Graham Sutherland | |
|---|---|
| Born | Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903-08-24)24 August 1903 Streatham, London, England |
| Died | 17 February 1980(1980-02-17) (aged 76) Trottiscliffe, Kent, England |
| Education | Goldsmiths College |
| Known for | Painter, etcher, designer |
| Notable work | Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph (tapestry atCoventry Cathedral) |
| Movement | Abstractionism,Surrealism |
| Awards | Order of Merit |
| Patrons | War Artists' Advisory Committee |
Graham Vivian SutherlandOM (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 thePembrokeshire landscape secured his reputation as a leading British modern artist. He served as an official war artist in theSecond 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,Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph. A number of portrait commissions in the 1950s proved highly controversial.Winston Churchill hated Sutherland'sdepiction of him and subsequentlyLady Spencer-Churchill had the painting destroyed.
During his career, Sutherland taught at a number of art colleges, notably atChelsea School of Art and atGoldsmiths College, where he had been a student. In 1955, Sutherland and his wife purchased a property nearNice. 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.
Graham Sutherland was born inStreatham, London, the eldest of three children of George Humphrey Vivian Sutherland (1873–1952), a barrister who later became a civil servant in theLand Registry and theBoard of Education, and his wife Elsie (1877–1957), née Foster.[1] Both were amateur painters and musicians.[2] Graham Sutherland attendedHomefield Preparatory School inSutton and was then educated atEpsom College inSurrey until 1919. Upon leaving school, after some preliminary coaching in art, Sutherland began an engineering apprenticeship at theMidland Railway locomotive works inDerby where several members of the extended Sutherland family had previously worked.[3] After a year, Sutherland succeeded in persuading his father that he was not destined for a career in engineering and that he should be allowed to study art. After failing to gain a place at his first choice, theSlade School of Art, he enteredGoldsmiths' School of Art in 1921, specialising inengraving andetching before graduating in 1926.[4] In both 1925 and 1928, Sutherland exhibited drawings and engravings at the XXI Gallery in London.[5] While still a student, Sutherland established a reputation as a fine printmaker and commercial printmaking would be his main source of income throughout the late 1920s.[3][2] His early prints of pastoral subjects show the influence ofSamuel Palmer, largely mediated by the older etcher,F.L. Griggs.
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Following the collapse of the print market in the early 1930s, due to theGreat Depression, Sutherland began to concentrate on painting.[6] His early paintings were mainly landscapes and show an affinity with the work ofPaul Nash. In 1934, Sutherland visitedPembrokeshire in Wales for the first time and was profoundly inspired by its landscape.[7][8] The region remained a source for his paintings for much of the following decade and he visited the area each year until the start of the Second World War.[6] Sutherland focused on the inherent strangeness of natural forms, abstracting them to sometimes give his work asurrealist appearance and in 1936 he exhibited at theInternational 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 theChelsea School of Art from 1926.[3] Between 1935 and 1940, he also taught composition and book illustration at Chelsea.[5] Sutherland converted toCatholicism 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 inTrottiscliffe in 1945.[5]
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 theWar Artists' Advisory Committee. He recorded bomb damage in rural and urban Wales towards the end of 1940, then bomb damage caused by theBlitz 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 titledDevastation:... 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 theSilvertown area of the East End.[3]
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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 theRoyal Ordnance Factory atWoolwich 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 atTrappes and on the flying bomb sites atSaint-Leu-d'Esserent in France.[16][17] In all, Sutherland completed some 150 paintings as part of his WAAC commission.[12]
In 1944, Sutherland was commissioned byWalter Hussey, the Vicar ofSt Matthew's Church, Northampton, and an important patron of modern religious art, to paintThe 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 theFrench Riviera, and he spent several months there each year. Eventually, in 1955, he purchased the villa Tempe à Pailla, designed by the Irish architectEileen Gray, atMenton, near the French-Italian border.
Beginning in 1949, alongside his abstract works, Sutherland painted a series of portraits of leading public figures, with those ofSomerset Maugham andLord Beaverbrook among the best known. Beaverbrook regarded his portrait by Sutherland, which clearly depicted him as cunning and reptilian, as both an "outrage" and a "masterpiece".[11] Maugham initially greatly disliked his portrait but came to admire it even though it had been described as making him look "like the madam of a brothel".[2]Sutherland'sPortrait 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 bySimon 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 ofmodern art".[19][20] Although the painting was subsequently destroyed on the orders ofLady 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 theQueen Mother established him as something of an unofficial state portrait painter. This status was underlined by the award of theOrder of Merit in 1960.[24]
In 1951, Sutherland was commissioned to produce a large work for theFestival of Britain.[25] He exhibited in the British Pavilion at theVenice Biennale in 1952 along withEdward Wadsworth and the New Aspects of British Sculpture Group.[26] From 1948 until 1954, Sutherland served as a trustee of theTate gallery.
In early 1954, Sutherland was commissioned to design a monumental tapestry for the newCoventry 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] ofFelletin in France, on nine occasions.[1]
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From his portrait work, Sutherland acquired several patrons in Italy and took to spending the summer inVenice. However, in 1967, for an Italian television documentary, Sutherland visitedPembrokeshire 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 andPicton. His work from this period includes two suites of printsThe Bees (1976–77) andApollinaire (1978–79).
There were major retrospective shows at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts in 1951, the Tate in 1982, theMusée Picasso, Antibes, France in 1998 and theDulwich Picture Gallery in 2005.[23] A major exhibition of rarely seen works on paper by Sutherland, curated by artistGeorge Shaw, was shown in Oxford, in 2011–12.
Sutherland died in 1980 and was buried in the graveyard of theChurch of St Peter and St Paul inTrottiscliffe, Kent.
The highest price reached by one of his paintings at the art market was whenThe Crucifixion (1947) sold at $1,156,549 bySotheby'sLondon on 15 June 2011.[27][28]
The main building ofCoventry School of Art and Design, part ofCoventry University, is named after Sutherland. A radio play,Portrait of Winston, byJonathan Smith, is a dramatisation of his portrait of Winston Churchill. The same incident features in theNetflix series,The Crown, in which Sutherland is played byStephen Dillane, and was discussed bySimon Schama in his 2015BBC television seriesThe Face of Britain by Simon Schama. Works by Sutherland are held in the collections ofAmgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales,Bristol Museum and Art Gallery,Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery,Herbert Art Gallery and Museum,Manchester Art Gallery,National Portrait Gallery,Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery,Pallant House Gallery,Southampton City Art Gallery, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art,Tenby Museum and Art Gallery,The Fitzwilliam Museum,The Priseman Seabrook Collection, andThe Phillips Collection.
In April 2025, anEnglish Heritageblue plaque was dedicated to him at his childhood home, on Dorset Road inMerton Park, South London.[29]
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