Paintings and Drawings by Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland was a prolific twentieth-century artist, working in a huge variety of mediums – including print, tapestry, ceramics and stage costumes – but he is near well known for his paintings. His semi-abstruse landscapes are surrealist in their depiction of foreign, looming natural forms and with their utilize of visual metaphor. His movement to painting portraits later in his career allowed his corporeal shapes to solidify into people.

A devout Catholic, perhaps Sutherland'south most famous commission depicted Jesus Christ in a gigantic tapestry for Coventry Cathedral. As an official war artist, he had painted the destruction left behind only likewise the Prime Minister that led the land through the conflict – the story behind Sutherland's ill-blighted committee of Winston Churchill is still beingness retold today.

Graham Vivian Sutherland was born in Streatham in S London in 1903, to parents Elsie and George Humphreys Vivian (or 'H. Five.') Sutherland. While Sutherland'due south father was a lawyer and ceremonious servant, both parents were amateur painters and musicians. The young artist showed a talent for cartoon and loved walking in nature. Sutherland first started training equally an engineering science amateur in Derby, equally the locomotive works had ties to his family. However, after a year, Sutherland'southward begetter agreed that he could get out engineering and go to fine art school. His first choice was The Slade only as information technology had no places left, Goldsmiths instead became his art college in 1921.

Pecken Wood 1925

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries

Though still in his early on 20s, Graham Sutherland showed huge talent as a printmaker, and he made a living in engravings and etchings, exhibiting works in London. His prints were mainly in the English Romantic pastoral tradition: finely executed scenes of copse, h2o and land with rich textures. They often prove rural workers, though the etching Adam and Eve shows Sutherland start to introduce his religious interests into his pictures. Purchased from his offset solo show in 1924 while he was still a pupil, a homo property tools and a half-dressed woman peer down a dark passage enveloped in creeping foliage.

Adam and Eve 1924

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

Aberystwyth Academy Schoolhouse of Art Museum and Galleries

Goldsmiths provided a sound, practical pedagogy, nevertheless Sutherland noted a lack of modernist influence: '... it was totally out of touch with the great European movements, so in full flower and moving to a climax... I do not remember hearing a discussion about the Impressionists and on the subject of the Modernistic Movement there was profound silence.'

Having graduated in 1926, Sutherland became a Cosmic and married his wife Kathleen the year following. Kathleen Barry was herself a student at Goldsmiths. After arranging a engagement to the ballet through shyly passing a note, the two became inseparable. After college, they settled in Kent, and Sutherland started teaching at the Chelsea Schoolhouse of Art.

Unfortunately, the dawn of a new decade proved a difficult time for the couple. Their son, John, died in infancy in 1929. Also, economic recession meant the British print sales market, on which Sutherland had based his career, took a downturn. His print Pastoral has been lauded equally a signifier of his mood at that time: creeping, tentacle-similar branches and bulbous vegetation surroundings a claustrophobic passage.

— Tate Liverpool (@tateliverpool) June 4, 2018

Still, a 1934 trip to Pembrokeshire in Wales proved inspirational to Sutherland. The artist was and then moved by the lush mural of gorse, rocky hollows, valleys and hills that he took up painting. Identifying with a land of 'exultant strangeness', he returned twelvemonth after year, producing oil paintings tinged with surrealistic forms – some of which were exhibited at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, then later at his first solo painting show in 1938.

The latter was predominantly formed of Welsh landscapes. The kickoff rumblings of war, however, may be traced in his work – every bit the Tate record explains, Black Mural shows Sutherland's anxiety at this time. 'Both the title and the ominous twilight effect suggest imminent violence... Here it is the stark rocky landscape that rises up as a dark, threatening presence.'

Looking at Sutherland's works in chronological order, human-like forms begin to erupt from the mural, becoming more ominous equally the Second World State of war progresses. White gorse is a pale, clawed paw. Two dark hedges lean together and conspire.

Tree forms lie fallen, wounded and exhausted. The nature that Sutherland has defended to finely depicting all his career has always held attention in his work, merely the 1930s and early 1940s are when the artist starts to paint trees, rocks and natural forms equally beings with their own bureau.

Tree Form 1941

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

Leeds Museums and Galleries

The Second World War meant the end of Sutherland'due south teaching postal service in Chelsea, and he and his wife moved to Gloucestershire. Notwithstanding the Sutherlands' move to a rural setting did not mean that the artist could dedicate himself purely to the natural landscape that then bewitched him.

Appointed every bit an official state of war creative person in 1940, Graham Sutherland painted bomb damage to mines and urban centres during the conflict, creating in full around 150 artworks. Speaking on the radio in 1941, he said: 'The sordidness and the anguish implied by some of the scenes of devastation will cause one to invent forms which are the pictorial essence of sordidness and anguish... Dirty-looking forms, tormented forms, forms which take on an almost human attribute.'

With the cease of the war, Sutherland's career took off: he had exhibitions in the UK and away, and a new teaching post at Goldsmiths. The artist took on some of import commissions, despite beginning to spend several months a year on the French Riviera – the climate aided Kathleen's health issues, but as well the landscape stirred excitement in the artist. In 1944, the Vicar of St Matthew's Church in Northampton commissioned Sutherland to pigment a Crucifixion scene. Completed in 1946, information technology was Sutherland's starting time painted formal figure study.

He made several smaller studies, now in public collections, for the larger piece in the church building. Christ appears pale, his pained expression and broken limbs hinting at his agony on the cross. Sutherland used photographs of his own trunk strung from the ceiling every bit reference points, as well as photographs of Nazi concentration camps.

Thorn Head 1949

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

National Galleries of Scotland

The Crucifixion started Sutherland's 'thorn menses', in which religious iconography and foreboding natural forms combined. The spikes and points, used to decisively divide space and barriers, become more abstracted over time. Other difficult naturalistic forms, such equally fossils, were the basis for his Origins of the Land.

Always productive, Sutherland's output did not abate in the 1940s and 1950s: his abstracted landscapes evolved in complexity. Colours and forms built into rich, confusing scenes, full of movement and detail.

Head II 1951

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Notwithstanding Sutherland as well produced a great many portraits at this time. While his surrealistic paintings developed in their complexity and iconography, Sutherland painted representative nevertheless unconventional likenesses of friends and notable figures, including Somerset Maugham.

Reputedly, Maugham was shocked and dismayed by the portrait when he start saw it but later came around, believing it to reveal his personality more than he wanted to admit. The artist Gerald Kelly said the portrait showed the sitter 'similar the madam of a brothel in Shanghai'. The orientalist touches, bamboo stool and sumptuous wearable can be read as nods to the Asian settings of Maugham's writing.

The portrait was non the only one of Sutherland'southward to cause offence or controversy.

In 1954, Members of Parliament commissioned a portrait of Winston Churchill to gloat the Prime Government minister's 80th birthday. As dramatised in the tv serial The Crown, Sutherland and Churchill'southward relationship was not straightforward. Churchill was a slap-up artist himself, though of a very different ilk to Sutherland. Both loved the landscape, art and their land, yet they clashed politically – the Bourgeois PM mocking Sutherland'south socialist leanings – and stylistically. Churchill was happy to paint a fictionalised scene for artful purposes, but Sutherland was unflinching in his portraits, preferring to speak the truth with his brushwork.

The elderly Churchill was not a good sitter, falling comatose, fidgeting and wishing to take a atomic number 82 in the portrait'due south limerick. Inevitably, the commission was non a success: Churchill rejected the portrait a few days earlier the official presentation, stating 'the painting, however masterly in execution, is not suitable', the pose suggesting him on the lavatory, 'half-witted'.

In what must have been a humiliating experience for both men, Churchill unveiled with a cutting quip that the work was 'a remarkable example of modernistic art', to the entertainment of the crowd gathered at Westminster Hall and the alive audience watching on television. As Simon Schama explains, Sutherland delivered the truth, but Churchill did non want the truth: 'No bulldog, no babyface. Just an obituary in paint'.

Though fabricated to hang in parliament, the portrait was sent to Churchill's dwelling house, Chartwell. Information technology transpired later on that Lady Churchill ordered it to be destroyed in a blaze. Some of the preparatory studies remain in public collections.

Though the commission was a negative experience, portraiture was just one string to Sutherland's bow. His other paintings, his surrealist landscapes, were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1952, and in 1960 he was awarded the Order of Merit. During this time, he worked to create a high-profile commission for the newly built Coventry Cathedral.

'Christ in Celebrity in the Tetramorph' situated in Coventry Cathedral

1962, tapestry by Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980) & workshop of Pinton Frères of Felletin

Unveiled in 1962, Christ in Celebrity is a gargantuan tapestry (1 of the largest single-piece tapestries in the world), 23 metres high by 12 metres wide. Designed by Sutherland, it was made in the French workshop of Pinton Frères of Felletin. A squad of 12 weavers, occasionally visited by Sutherland, worked on the piece for two years, using more 900 colours.

The tapestry's design features Christ surrounded past the symbols of the Four Evangelists: a lion, a calf, an eagle and an angel. Christ is shown as a protector to a higher place humanity, serene and beyond pain. Sutherland'south source materials included sketches of zoo animals in Maidstone, faces painted by Rembrandt and cyclists in Paris Match magazine. Sketches and studies are held at Coventry'south Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

In the later years of his life, Sutherland spent time in Venice, the south of France and also returned to Pembrokeshire, the natural landscape continuing to lend its shapes and forms to his paintings. In a letter to his biographer Rosalind Thuillier, Sutherland explains the 'vocabulary of forms' in the location 'appeal to me at the point where they are complimentary more or less from their environment and so ready to lead a new life in pictorial form'. And then thankful to the role of the country that inspired him, he left a body of work as the Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire in 1976, the collection eventually transferring to Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

Dog Rock 1975–1976

Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903–1980)

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Always prolific, Sutherland continued to make his portrait commissions and his own surreal scenes up until his death at the age of 76. His later 'landscapes' are kaleidoscopic in their detail – natural forms bend and misconstrue against dreamlike backdrops, and echoes of objects are nigh recognisable until they dissolve away into other shapes and colours.

Made the twelvemonth before he died, Untitled (Keep Out), for instance, seems to show the impish face of a cloaked figure, between tree-similar forms. A painted sign warns the viewer before the welcoming yellow glow of a mysterious entrance.

Looking at Sutherland's piece of work is an exercise in spotting details, an endeavour to recognise clues and signs – it feels like divining a bulletin from the natural mural, a message that may or may not exist there.

Like his contemporary Henry Moore, Sutherland obtained global recognition for his art but continually reflected the forms of the British landscape in his work: Edward Sackville-West lauded the artists as two of the most meaning in the twentieth century, both possessing 'the unmoved, receptive eyes which alone can reflect the tragic idyll of contemporary England.'

Sutherland's modernist thinking emerged out of a background in Romantic appreciation of nature, and he elevated the landscape through his spiritual outlook. That a big number of his artworks are kept in public collections adjure to his originality.

Jade King, Lead Editor at Art UK

More than stories

Artworks

robinsonthetting.blogspot.com

Source: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/graham-sutherland-the-evolution-of-a-twentieth-century-master

Share this post