Graham Vivian Sutherland

English artist

• Born: August 24, 1903
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 17, 1980
• Place of death: London, England

Creatively fusing the English tradition of painting by the light of nature with the European practice of art, Sutherland earned his place as the most distinguished and original English artist of the mid-twentieth century. With a corps of other artists, he was commissioned to make an artistic record of World War II.

Early Life

Born in the London suburb of Streatham, Graham Vivian Sutherland was the firstborn child of George Humphreys Vivian Sutherland and Elsie Sutherland (née Foster). During his youth, the family lived variously in Merton Park, Surrey; Rustington in Sussex; and Sutton in Surrey, where Graham attended preparatory school. He then attended public school at Epsom College until the age of sixteen, when Graham became an apprentice in the locomotive works in Derby. He hated being there. He was ill-equipped for the work both physically and mathematically. At a technical college that Sutherland concurrently attended, he discovered his penchant for drawing. The skill he acquired doing drafting assignments later resurfaced in his period as a war artist, when he made studies of steelworks and munitions factories.

Sutherland left Derby in 1920 and the following year enrolled in Goldsmith’s College of Art, where he remained until 1926. There he prospered, learning drawing from work in numerous techniques taught at the school. He made frequent trips to the Kent and Sussex countryside, drawing from nature in the grand English tradition. During this period and for the next ten years, he also gave considerable time to engraving. He came under the influence of F. L. Griggs, a master engraver; his first etchings were issued, and Barn Interior I (1922) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1923.

In 1927, Sutherland married Kathleen Frances Barry and moved to Kent. Over the next several years, until 1939, he supplemented his income by teaching and for a time by designing commercial posters. Sutherland was an attractive, charming man who was modest about his work, often to the point of insecurity. As a result, throughout his life he was unwilling to reject any project offered him, and he was often woefully behind schedule.

In 1931, he began painting, although little is known of his earliest works because he destroyed most of them. In 1934, he made the first of many visits to Wales, and it was there that he developed the foundation of his body of work, although he did none of the painting there. Sutherland found it preferable to store the spaces and concentrations of land in his mind and then take them back to the studio, where he reformulated them in retrospect. He began to paint only after having sensed the emotion of being on the brink of some drama much like William Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” and only by paraphrasing or condensing what he had seen. In this respect he was at one with William Blake and Samuel Palmer, and this creative method never altered over the next thirty years. Notable examples of these early Welsh paintings are Green Tree Form (1939), Cliff Road (1941), Red Landscape (1941-1942), and Landscape with Pointed Rocks (1944).

Sutherland’s years as a war artist from 1940 to 1945 completed his rather long early development. Under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Clark, a corps of artists, Sutherland among them, was commissioned to make an artistic record of World War II. Sutherland painted bombed dwellings at Swansea, burned-out office buildings and factories in London and its suburbs, and open-cast coal mines and tin mines. Stylistically, these war paintings were more diverse than previously. What is seen in them is a further buttressing of Sutherland’s ability to portray with maximum intensity his stored images, at times giving an ominous quality to the scene. He had by this time, nevertheless, matured enough to vary his treatments, utilizing the receding linear perspectives reminiscent of Blake’s plates and alternatively painting such works as Burnt-out Paper Rolls (1941), which resembled in “death” their tree-trunk origins. No less important was his establishment at this time of a purely factual idiom; unlike his contemporaries, Sutherland projected the human implications of wartime scenes and in so doing selflessly suppressed his artistic ego.

Life’s Work

In 1944, Sutherland was commissioned to do a Crucifixion painting for St. Matthew’s Church in Northhampton. Sutherland spent more than a year grappling with the stylistic difficulty of devising a painting that would express in twentieth century terms the traditional iconography, that is, the symbol of the precarious balanced moment, the hair’s breadth between black and white. This struggle is evident in his studies and paintings Thorn Trees (1945) and Thorn Heads (1946), both then and several years later abstractions of the tortured head of Christ. While Sutherland’s Crucifixion , completed in 1946, is thought to be flawed by the weakness of the subject’s legs, it proved to be a powerful depiction, at once stark, angular, pathetic, and horrible.

The great importance of this postwar period, however, was in the transition that took place in all of his work. It occurred gradually between 1944 and 1948. Sutherland gave up the effect of tunnel vision found in the earlier works and broadened his line of sight laterally. He also began experimenting with an interplay between the artificial and the natural so that natural growths appear to be on platforms. Thistles (1945) and Thorns (1945) are propped up on poles; the animal-like pieces of driftwood in Turning Form (1947) and Articulated Form (1947) are on pedestals. Also in 1947, Sutherland began spending time in the south of France, and his movement toward European art can be seen in his utilization of lighter tones and brighter colors, as well as in his incorporation of the imprint of humans on nature in his landscapes. He was beginning to find his own way of expressing the influence on him of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and other Paris-based artists without abandoning his individuality. These influences can be seen in Smiling Woman (1945) and Woman in a Garden (1945).

Beginning in 1949 and continuing for the rest of his life, Sutherland undertook some forty-one portraits. For those who appreciate casual art it is the work by which he is best known. The first was of W. Somerset Maugham in 1949, and perhaps the most notorious was of Winston Churchill in 1954. Sutherland’s portraits were meticulous recordings, the product of patient observance of the gestures, attitudes, and facial expressions of the subject until his essence revealed itself to the artist. While Maugham eventually loved his portrait, Churchill, believing that his own made him appear half-witted, saw it as a plot to remove him from power. To exacerbate matters, the portrait received extraordinary coverage; it was carried in every newspaper in the country and in many abroad. A year later, Lady Clementine Churchill ordered it destroyed.

Thus, Sutherland was not without disappointments. The Churchill portrait and the Coventry tapestry, which was commissioned at about the same time in the early 1950’s, and which was ten years in the making, represent the major setbacks in his career. He was commissioned to design the tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral. The finished work was huge and overpowering; the treatment, however, was generally thought to be ineffective. It depicted a Christ in sitting position surrounded by the symbols of the four Evangelists: lion (St. Mark), eagle (St. John), calf (St. Luke), and man (St. Matthew). As one commentator has indicated, the Christ appeared mawkish and his feet were clumsily drawn.

In the last period of his life, from 1965 to 1980, a certain repetitiveness was noticeable in Sutherland’s work. He began to be vigorously patronized by the Italians, and he spent the better part of his time in Italy. Much energy went into lithographs, which proved to be a lucrative business for him. Notable among them was Bestiary (1968), a series of twenty-six lithographs. Sutherland died in London of cancer on February 17, 1980.

Significance

Creatively, Sutherland had brought to the body of English art a much-needed international diversity. However, Sutherland’s vision was completely individual; he was not dominated by any other artist or artistic movement. His work defied classification he was neither expressionist nor realist, Surrealist nor cubist. Rather, he sought always to make visual bridges between schools of artistic approach, in the same way that he made bridges between the natural, the animal, and the human.

In his investigative, rigorously honest style of portraiture, Sutherland showed a modesty that was admirable as well as courageous. More important, it is a measure of his breadth, for his Romantic tendencies formed the same kind of duality with his factual portraiture that is formed between hope and despair in his Crucifixion.

Sutherland’s work did not go unappreciated during his lifetime. In 1960, he was awarded the highly distinguished Order of Merit and received numerous awards and accolades in England as well as around the world. Overall, Sutherland’s work, the landscape painting, lithography, portraiture, posters, stained glass, tapestry designs, textile designs, watercolors, all have earned for him an honored place of artistic merit in the human community.

Bibliography

Berthoud, Roger. Graham Sutherland: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber, 1982. An exhaustive biographical account based largely on taped interviews with Sutherland and his wife. Rich in contemporary settings for each work. Less useful for its critical content.

Cooper, Douglas. The Work of Graham Sutherland. London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1961. Although this work was criticized when published for unrelated reasons as well as for the assessment of Sutherland as the only significant English painter since John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, on the whole the analysis of Sutherland’s canon is unparalleled in its clarity.

Ebony, David. “Sutherland’s Belated Homecoming.” Art in America 92, no. 1 (January, 2004): 42-47. Discusses the renewed interest of art patrons in Sutherland’s work. Provides information about Sutherland’s life, career, and paintings.

Hammer, Martin. Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2005. Examines the thematic and stylistic similarities between Sutherland and British painter Francis Bacon based in part on Bacon’s letters to Sutherland.

Hayes, John. The Art of Graham Sutherland. New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1980. Thorough, but perhaps excessive in the author’s unconditional love for Sutherland’s work. Does contain a reproduction of one early 1930’s painting not available in any other catalog.

Sackville-West, E. Graham Sutherland. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1943. Well-phrased discussion of Sutherland’s connection to the Romantic poets. Articulate coverage of his artistic technique during the early years. Uneven quality in the reproduction of the plates.

Tassi, Roberto. The Wartime Drawings. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1980. One of the numerous Italian books of criticism characterized by thorough detail but unswerving devotion. This work is recognized as one that helped thrust the wartime drawings into the limelight as one of Sutherland’s most moving achievements.