A leading figure in modern art and in the ‘Neo-Romanticism’ movement, Sutherland was born in Streatham, London, in 1903 to the son of a barrister and civil servant. After a brief spell training under an engineering apprenticeship to the Midland Railway Works, Sutherland persuaded his father to allow him to explore his creative nature and in 1921 he entered Goldsmiths’ College of Art and later taught composition and book illustration at Chelsea School of Art. From 1940 to 1945 Sutherland served as an official war artist, during which time he documented the destruction of towns and cities in England and France and produced some of his most evocative work. His patrons included Colin Anderson; Sir Kenneth Clarke; and William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook.
Sutherland began his career focussing on printmaking and specialised in etching at Goldsmith’s, but was later known for portraiture, landscapes, still life, figurative and religious works, posters and book illustrations. Sutherland’s body of work also included glass design, tapestry and ceramics. His early etchings were influenced by a wide array of artists and artistic movements, including the works of the Romantics William Blake and Samuel Palmer, the Surrealist-Romantic contributions of Paul Nash, as well as the abstracts of Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso. Sutherland’s first portrait was a full length study of the author Somerset Maugham (1949, Tate collection), which was followed by a portrait of Baron Beaverbrook (1952, The National Portrait Gallery). He went on to paint several more notable subjects of the day including, Edward Sackville-West (1954, National Trust Collections); Paul Sacher (1956, National Museum of Wales) and Helena Rubenstein (1957, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia). Nevertheless, perhaps his most ‘infamous’ and yet ‘short-lived’ portrait is that of Sir Winston Churchill (1954), which was commissioned by an all-parliamentary committee as a gift for the then Prime Minister’s eightieth birthday. The portrait was praised as much as it was reviled by Members of Parliament and despite Sutherland and Churchill enjoying each other’s company during sittings the finished article was, unfortunately, loathed by the sitter. So much so, that the original portrait was destroyed not long after it was painted on the orders of Lady Clementine Churchill.
A visit to Pembrokeshire in the spring of 1934 changed the course of Sutherland’s artistic life. In a letter that was later published in Horizon magazine in Sutherland’s essay ‘Welsh Sketch Book’ he wrote, ‘it was in this country that I began to learn painting’. Sutherland went on to observe how ‘it was in this area that I learned that landscape is not necessarily scenic, but that its parts have an individual figurative detachment…the whole setting is one of exuberance – of darkness and light – of decay and life’. Pembrokeshire remained a source of great inspiration to Sutherland, but it was only after 1967 that it became an annual pilgrimage for the artist following his return to the area with an Italian documentary maker.
It is in Sutherland’s experiences of the landscapes of Pembrokeshire where we begin to see his move towards the Neo-Romanticism movement. This movement flourished in the first half of the twentieth century but peaked in the periods before and after the Second World War, and was known for sombre, introspective and brooding works of art centred on the depiction of turmoil, anxiety and despair. In common with nineteenth-century Romanticism, this movement served as a commentary on modernity that found artists casting an emotionality onto their relationships with nature. However, rather than critiquing industrialisation the Neo-Romantics sought to unpack the unease and disillusionment surrounding pre and post-Second World War Britain, producing works ‘rich, poetic and capable of a visionary intensity’ that bridged other artistic movements such as Surrealism and Cubism.
Sutherland’s conversion to Catholicism in 1926 may well have inspired his later works, although it was not until 1944 that he began his first religious piece which was commissioned by Walter Hussey, vicar of Saint Matthew’s Church in Northampton. Drawing inspiration from the sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece by Nikolaus Hagenauer and Matthias Grünewald (1512-1516), Sutherland was compelled to paint The Crucifixion (1946) after being inspired and horrified in equal measure by images of liberated but emaciated Holocaust survivors from German concentration camps. This figurative piece recalls the vulnerability and suffering of the human form through its depiction of Christ on the cross and remains one of his most arresting works.
In 1952 Sutherland accepted a commission to complete the central tapestry in the newly built Coventry Cathedral, with the subject expected to be Christ the Redeemer. After several years intensive development and around forty-two studies Sutherland’s final piece, Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph, was installed in 1962 and was at the time the largest single woven tapestry in the world. Yet there was much controversy surrounding the installation of the tapestry about where it should first be hung, resulting in the relationship between Sutherland and the cathedral’s architect, Basil Spence, ending bitterly.
During his lifetime, Sutherland exhibited in London and New York, with the success of his work culminating in 1952 in exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and, in the following year, at the Tate Gallery in London. For almost twenty years a substantial portion of Sutherland’s later work was also on display in the Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, running from 1976 through to 1995 after which its contents were passed to the national museums and galleries of Wales in Cardiff.
LITERATURE & FURTHER READING
· Roger Berthoud, ‘Graham Vivian Sutherland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed. 2008).
· Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1982).
· Daniel Frampton, ‘Objectifying the Unknown: The Catholic Art of Graham Sutherland’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 24:1 (2021), 124-156.
· Martin Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950 (London: Scala Publishers, 2005).
· Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland: Patterns of Affinity in British Culture of the 1940s (London: Yale University Press, 2005).
· John Hayes, The Art of Graham Sutherland (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980).
· Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, ‘Making a Masterpiece: Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory’, 2014 (exhibition).
· Stuart Sillars, British Romantic Art and the Second World War (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).
· Graham Sutherland, ‘Welsh Sketch Book’, Horizon, 5:28 (1942), 225-235.
· Tate.org.uk (website page on Sutherland and Neo-Romanticism)
· The Churchill Project, Hillsdale College (website)