Graham Sutherland

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Graham Sutherland
Goldsmiths College
Known forPainter, etcher, designer
Notable workChrist in Glory in the Tetramorph (tapestry at Coventry Cathedral)
MovementAbstractionism, Surrealism
AwardsOrder of Merit
Patron(s)War Artists' Advisory Committee

Graham Vivian Sutherland

OM
(24 August 1903 – 17 February 1980) was a prolific English artist. Notable for his paintings of abstract landscapes and for his portraits of public figures, Sutherland also worked in other media, including printmaking, tapestry and glass design.

Printmaking, mostly of romantic landscapes, dominated Sutherland's work during the 1920s. He developed his art by working in watercolours before switching to using oil paints in the 1940s. A series of surreal oil paintings depicting the

Second World War
, painting industrial scenes on the British home front. After the war, Sutherland embraced figurative painting, beginning with his 1946 work, The Crucifixion. Subsequent paintings combined religious symbolism with motifs from nature, such as thorns.

Such was Sutherland's standing in post-war Britain that he was commissioned to design the massive central tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral,

depiction of him and subsequently Lady Spencer-Churchill
had the painting destroyed.

During his career, Sutherland taught at a number of art colleges, notably at

Goldsmiths College, where he had been a student. In 1955, Sutherland and his wife purchased a property near Nice
. Living abroad led to something of a decline in his status in Britain. However, a visit to Pembrokeshire in 1967, his first trip there in nearly twenty years, led to a creative renewal that went some way toward restoring his reputation as a leading British artist.

Biography

Early life

Graham Sutherland was born in

F.L. Griggs
.

1930s

Slag-ladles (1943) (Art.IWM ART LD 1773)

Following the collapse of the print market in the early 1930s, due to the

International Surrealist Exhibition in London.[9] As the 1930s progressed and the political situation in Europe grew worse, he began to depict ominous, distorted human forms emerging from the land.[2][10] Oil paintings of the Pembrokeshire landscape dominated his first one-man exhibition of paintings, held in September 1938 at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.[5] It was these oil paintings, of surreal, organic landscapes of the Pembrokeshire coast, that secured his reputation as a leading British modern artist.[11]

Alongside oil painting, Sutherland also took up glass design, fabric design, and poster design during the 1930s, and taught engraving at the

Chelsea School of Art from 1926.[3] Between 1935 and 1940, he also taught composition and book illustration at Chelsea.[5] Sutherland converted to Catholicism in December 1926, the year before his marriage to Kathleen Barry (1905–1991), who had been his fellow student at Goldsmiths College. The couple, who were inseparable, lived at various locations in Kent, before eventually buying a property in Trottiscliffe in 1945.[5]

World War Two

At the start of World War Two, the Chelsea School of Art closed for the duration of the conflict and Sutherland moved to rural Gloucestershire.[12] Between 1940 and 1945, Sutherland was employed as a full-time, salaried artist by the War Artists' Advisory Committee. He recorded bomb damage in rural and urban Wales towards the end of 1940, then bomb damage caused by the Blitz in the City and East End of London.[8][13] Almost all of Sutherland's paintings of bomb damage from the Blitz, either in Wales or in London, are titled Devastation:... and as such form a single body of work reflecting the needs of war-time propaganda, with precise locations not being disclosed and human remains not shown.[14] A number of features reoccur within this body of work, for example, the fallen lift shafts that were often the most recognizable aspect of larger bombed buildings and a double row of bombed houses Sutherland saw in the Silvertown area of the East End.[3]

The City a fallen lift shaft (1941) (Art.IWM ART LD 893)
Devastation, 1941: An East End Street (Tate)
Devastation, 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse (Tate)

Sutherland returned to Wales in September 1941 to work on a series of paintings of blast furnaces. From June 1942, he painted further industrial scenes, first at tin mines in Cornwall, then at a limestone quarry in Derbyshire, and then at open-cast and underground coal mines in the Swansea area of South Wales. Sutherland spent four months from the end of March 1944 at the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich Arsenal working on a series of five paintings for WAAC.[15] In December 1944, he was sent to depict the damage inflicted by the RAF on the railway yards at Trappes and on the flying bomb sites at Saint-Leu-d'Esserent in France.[16][17] In all, Sutherland completed some 150 paintings as part of his WAAC commission.[12]

Post-war career

In 1944, Sutherland was commissioned by Walter Hussey, the Vicar of St Matthew's Church, Northampton, and an important patron of modern religious art, to paint The Crucifixion (1946).[18] This was Sutherland's first major religious painting and his first large figure study.[2] The Crucifixion shows a pale Christ with broken limbs and was followed by a series of paintings that combined abstract forms from nature, usually the spikes and points of thorns, with religious iconography.[2] A subsequent series, Origins of the Land, developed this approach, showing combinations of rocks and fossils in increasingly complex and abstract designs.[2]

In 1946, Sutherland had his first exhibition in New York. That same year, he also taught painting at Goldsmiths' School of Art. From 1947 into the 1960s, his work was inspired by the landscape of the French Riviera, and he spent several months there each year. Eventually, in 1955, he purchased the villa Tempe à Pailla, designed by the Irish architect Eileen Gray, at Menton, near the French-Italian border.

1950s

The tapestry Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph in Coventry Cathedral, installed in 1962

Beginning in 1949, alongside his abstract works, Sutherland painted a series of portraits of leading public figures, with those of

Sutherland's Portrait of Winston Churchill (1954) greatly upset the sitter, who initially refused to accept its presentation.[19] The elderly Churchill had wanted to direct the composition towards a fictionalised scene but Sutherland had insisted upon a realistic portrayal, one described by Simon Schama as "No bulldog, no baby face. Just an obituary in paint".[2] After initially refusing to be presented with it at all, Churchill accepted the painting disparagingly as “a remarkable example of modern art".[19][20] Although the painting was subsequently destroyed on the orders of Lady Spencer-Churchill,[21] some of Sutherland's studies for the portrait have survived.[21][22][23] In all, Sutherland painted more than fifty portraits, often of European aristocrats or senior businessmen.[24] Following the Churchill portrait, Sutherland's portraits of, among others, Konrad Adenauer and the Queen Mother established him as something of an unofficial state portrait painter. This status was underlined by the award of the Order of Merit in 1960.[24]

In 1951, Sutherland was commissioned to produce a large work for the Festival of Britain.[25] He exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952 along with Edward Wadsworth and the New Aspects of British Sculpture Group.[26] From 1948 until 1954, Sutherland served as a trustee of the Tate gallery.

In early 1954, Sutherland was commissioned to design a monumental tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral. Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph took three years to complete and was installed in 1962. To complete the work, Sutherland visited the weavers, Pinton Frères [fr] of Felletin in France, on nine occasions.[1]

Later life

Devastation, 1940, A House on the Welsh Border (Tate)

From his portrait work, Sutherland acquired several patrons in Italy and took to spending the summer in Venice. However, in 1967, for an Italian television documentary, Sutherland visited Pembrokeshire for the first time in more than twenty years and became inspired by the landscape to regularly work in the region until his death.[5] Living abroad had led to something of a decline in his status in Britain, but his return to working in Pembrokeshire went some way toward restoring his reputation as a leading British artist.[11] Much of his work from this point until the end of his life incorporates motifs taken from the area, such as the estuaries at Sandy Haven and Picton. His work from this period includes two suites of prints The Bees (1976–77) and Apollinaire (1978–79).

There were major retrospective shows at the

Musée Picasso, Antibes, France in 1998 and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2005.[23] A major exhibition of rarely seen works on paper by Sutherland, curated by artist George Shaw
, was shown in Oxford, in 2011–12.

Sutherland died in 1980 and was buried in the graveyard of the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Trottiscliffe, Kent.

Art market

The highest price reached by one of his paintings at the art market was when The Crucifixion (1947) was sold at $1,156,549 by Sotheby's London on 15 June 2011.[27][28]

Legacy

The main building of

The Fitzwilliam Museum and The Priseman Seabrook Collection
.

Honours and awards

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Jade King (24 August 2021). "Graham Sutherland: the evolution of a twentieth-century master". Art UK. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-1-908326-38-6
    .
  4. ISBN 9780905005485
    .
  5. ^
    ISBN 0-19-861403-9
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 1-85149-106-6
    .
  7. ^ "Graham Sutherland (1903–1980)". British Council. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  8. ^
    ISBN 0708308546
    .
  9. ISBN 978-1-84403-563-2
    .
  10. ^ "Display caption, Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods". Tate. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
  11. ^
    BBC Wales
    . 13 January 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2016.
  12. ^ a b Caroline Lewis. "War Artists - World War Two on Canvas and Paper Part One: The Home Front". culture24.org.uk. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  13. ^ "Display caption, Devastation, 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse". Tate. May 2007. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  14. ^ Chris Stephens (November 1998). "Catalogue entry, Devastation, 1940: A House on the Welsh Border". Tate. Retrieved 19 November 2016.
  15. ^ Chris Stephens (September 1998). "Catalogue entry, Furnaces, 1944". Tate. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  16. ^ Imperial War Museum. "Correspondence with Artists, Graham Sutherland". Imperial War Museum. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  17. ISBN 978-0-300-10890-3
    .
  18. ^ Chris Stephens (March 1998). "Catalogue entry, The Crucifixion 1946". Tate. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  19. ^ a b Michal Meyer (2018). "Sketch of a Scientist". Distillations. 4 (1). Science History Institute: 10–11. Retrieved 27 June 2018.
  20. ISBN 9781472592415
    . Retrieved 27 June 2018.
  21. ^ a b Furness, Hannah (10 July 2015). "Secret of Winston Churchill's unpopular Sutherland portrait revealed". The Daily Telegraph. London.
  22. ^ Jonathan Jones (3 November 2001). "Winston Churchill, Graham Sutherland (1954)". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  23. ^ a b Kevin Driscoll (2 September 2005). "The Artist Winston Churchill Loved to Hate". OhMyNews. Archived from the original on 22 March 2006. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
  24. ^ a b Chris Stephens (November 1998). "Catalogue entry: Lord Goodman (1973-4) by Graham Sutherland OM". Tate. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  25. ^ "Display caption, The Origins of the Land". Tate. August 2004. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  26. ^ Tom Overton (2009). "Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), Venice Biennale participation". British Council. Archived from the original on 22 November 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2016.
  27. ^ Mutual Art
  28. ^ Sotheby's
  29. ^ "A Sixties Pressure Group | Printmakers Council". 4 April 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2022.

Further reading

  • Martin Hammer. Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924–1950. Scala, 2005
  • Martin Hammer. Bacon and Sutherland. Yale University Press, 2005
  • William Boyd. On Graham Sutherland. Bernard Jacobson Limited, 1993
  • Roger Berthoud. Graham Sutherland: A Biography.
    Faber and Faber
    , 1982.
  • Roberto Tassi. (Julian Andrews, tr.) Sutherland: The Wartime Drawings. Sotheby Parke-Bernet Publications, 1981
  • John Hayes. The Art of Graham Sutherland. Phaidon Press, 1980.
  • Douglas Cooper. The Work of Graham Sutherland. David McKay Publications, 1961.
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