David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits.
Graham Sutherland, ‘Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924—1950.’ Dulwich
Picture Gallery, London, 15 June to 25 September 2005.
Published in The Times Literary Supplement, 2005.
Up to 1939 Graham Sutherland lived what he called ‘a really insular English
life’, and it’s right there in his earliest works, the highly accomplished,
highly detailed etchings of a fecund English landscape. For anyone familiar
only with Sutherland’s paintings, these intricately realized works might
appear something of an enigma. Certainly, the Dulwich exhibition opens with
a room filled with his better-known, later works, the work that made his reputation,
the roughly-handled Welsh landscapes with their sick greens and vivid reds.
It’s only after our introduction to these paintings that we step back
in time to the earlier Sutherland, the meticulous printmaker of the 1920s and
early ‘30s.
For it was as a printmaker deeply moved by the bucolic Christian vision of Samuel
Palmer that Sutherland first emerged into public consciousness, and it is revealing
to see him in both guises in this fascinating retrospective — surprisingly,
the first to be held in London since 1982. Samuel Palmer liked etching because
it spared the artist ‘the dreadful death-grapple with colour’ — an
irony given Sutherland’s future romance with the painter’s palette.
But Sutherland also discovered in Palmer a complexity and multiplicity of line,
an awareness for unexpected viewpoints, and what he saw in the Victorian artist
as a ‘total disregard for conventional composition’. These were lessons
he would continue to use through his long career. To see the works from this
early period alongside three works of Palmer’s that were once in Sutherland’s
own collection, together with William Blake’s tiny wood-engraved illustrations
to Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil, is a real treat.
Sutherland might have continued along this course if it wasn’t for the
Wall Street Crash in 1929, which cut off the American market and his, till then,
remunerative career as a printmaker. He continued to etch, however, through till
1931, when the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers rejected his bizarre
image of The Garden for exhibition. Here, and in Pastoral of the year before,
we see a new, more recognisable Sutherland emergent — the Sutherland of
twisting living shapes and strange perspectives. Clearly another new influence
was on the scene — this time the landscape painter Paul Nash, who would
soon become one of England’s leading Surrealists. The ageing printmaker
and erstwhile mentor F.L. Griggs is supposed to have pondered, ‘What is
Sutherland up to? I wish he would leave Nash alone.’
Others must have thought the same thing. Nevertheless, the new friendship sparked
an exciting new direction, and in the early ‘30s Sutherland started working
seriously in watercolours and oil. But the tranquil landscapes of Dorset, Sussex,
and Kent (where he set up home, and where he completed most of his finished paintings) — the
landscapes that had inspired Nash in the years after the Great War — did
not work for him. It was not till 1934 that he first visited south Wales, and
discovered what David Mellor has perfectly described as ‘Sutherland’s
sliced and sickle-shaped Pembrokeshire fields and roads’. From the moment
he first set foot there, Sutherland was ‘obsessed’. ‘It was
in this country I began to learn painting' he recalled in his ‘Welsh Sketch
Book’. He was fascinated by the strange Blake-like forms of the rocks,
the skulls of horses and horns of cattle ‘lying bleached on the sand’,
and ‘the damp green gloom of woods which run down to the edge of low blackish
moss-covered cliffs’. Here he discovered for himself Dylan Thomas’s ‘green
fuse’ that ‘Drives my green age’.
Yet England in the 1930s was once more moving away from its mythical ‘green
age’, and the ‘green and pleasant land’ of the nineteenth-century
Romantics was being left behind and lost beneath tarmac and mortar. The Council
for the Preservation of Rural England had been founded in 1926, and J.B Priestley
wrote in 1934 of the emergence of a ‘Third England’, neither old
rural nor new industrial, an ‘England of arterial and by-pass roads, of
filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant
cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages’. George
Orwell’s protagonist in his 1939 novel Coming up for Air, a book pregnant
with the threat of war, returns to his home town to discover it has been ‘swallowed
up in development: “I had the feeling of an enemy invasion having happened
behind my back.”’ This sense of loss, of a vivid, living countryside
existing under threat, together with the air of an impending crisis, consciously
or otherwise, mediates Sutherland’s work of this era, as it does that of
Nash. With his south London upbringing, it seems no surprise that he found something
more compelling and vibrant in the wilder landscape of south Wales.
Inevitably, Picasso’s vast depiction of the Spanish Civil War outrage at
Guernica, together with its sixty-seven preparatory drawings, exhibited in London
in autumn 1938, made a great impression on Sutherland. ‘Everything I saw
at this time seemed to exhort me to a greater freedom’ he later recalled.
But only Picasso ‘seemed to have the true idea of metamorphosis whereby
things found a new form through feeling.’ He had still not visited Paris,
however. Before he got the chance, the continent was cut off by war.
Recruited by Kenneth Clark into the War Artists scheme to record the effects
of the conflict, Sutherland produced a range of excellent works, first of bomb
damaged towns in Wales, and then in London; these he followed up with drawings
and paintings of mines, foundries and quarries around England. In these subjects,
many of them on display here, he found a way to mix the lessons he had learnt
in Wales with a new subject matter: twisted metal girders like his monstrous
branches, the insides of gloomy mine shafts ribbed like the inside of his trees.
Here he responded to the physical damage bombs wrought on cities and buildings
in a way similar way to Nash’s response to the destruction of Nature in
the First War: the suffering of battle is wrought not on human faces, but on
human landscapes. The foundries, with their boiling ladles and blast furnaces,
ruby hot and sulphur yellow, are hugely reminiscent of Blake’s illustrations
to Dante’s Inferno, and the whole atmosphere of his war work is dark, brooding,
hell-like. He would later explain that these latter subjects ‘seemed to
symbolise a kind of eternal war; a constant of conflict between the forces of
man and nature … The turning of iron ore into steel seemed so much a primitive
combat’. These dramatic works are the peak of this exhibition: Sutherland
had been excellently well chosen by Clark to tackle just these subjects.
Sutherland continued to visit Wales through the war, and lived for a while in
Kenneth Clark’s country home in Gloucestershire, where Henry Moore was
also a guest. His figures of men in these mine, quarry and foundry works are
heavily influenced by Moore. In fact, a drawing by Moore, ‘Miner at Work’ (1942),
nestles inconspicuously amongst these works, and it takes a moment to notice
it. This sense of influence is heightened in the last room of the exhibition,
which contains Sutherland’s first works after the war, and two of his early
portraits. Sutherland had probably known Francis Bacon since the late 1930s,
but their earliest correspondence dates from early 1943. Bacon had seen what
Sutherland was doing, liked it, and wrote to tell him so. When Bacon’s Three
Studies of Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion were first exhibited at
the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945, Sutherland was amongst the other artists whose
work was also on show. By that date Sutherland had already been commissioned
to paint a crucifixion subject of his own. Sutherland never saw the Nazi death
camps, but their reality bit into his consciousness.
The ‘Thorn Pictures’ that resulted from this commission are good,
but they do not measure up to Bacon, who had now found his feet as an artist
of extraordinary power. It was Bacon who in 1947 recommended that Sutherland
visit the south of France: there he met Matisse, became friends with Picasso,
and moved into portraiture. Southern France now replaced Pembrokeshire as the
principal source of his subject matter — but not for the better. Sutherland
was at heart a northern Romantic artist, and the brighter colours, sun washed,
that came to infuse his paintings seem all wrong. Dulwich’s curators conclude
that at the start of the 1950s Sutherland ‘had years of great acclaim and
success ahead of him, but arguably his most effective and original work behind
him.’ They are surely right. Although Sutherland was for a while more famous,
Bacon eventually eclipsed him. Seeing these final works of the exhibition, one
is left with the question, was Sutherland too influenced by his influences? Early
in his career he had used Blake, Palmer and Nash to propel his own vision forward;
but after the war that vision seems to falter, and sadly much of his later work
feels like second-rate Bacon.
© David Boyd Haycock