For as long as I’ve been interested in Modern British art, I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by the work of Graham Sutherland (1903–80). One of the first Cork Street exhibitions I went to as a schoolboy was of paintings, gouaches, watercolours and graphics by Sutherland from the collection of Douglas Cooper, held at the Redfern Gallery in the autumn of 1976. I was enormously impressed, particularly by the golden-eyed toad rampant, the thorny sentinel figures, a 1944 Welsh landscape and a gouache of bomb-damaged buildings from 1942. (My recall is not always quite so accurate: in fact, I have the fold-out card from the exhibition before me as I write.) Only much later did I learn that the reason the great collector and art historian Douglas Cooper was selling his Sutherlands was that he had fallen out with the artist — not an unusual occurrence for such a touchy and irascible man — and wished publicly to withdraw his favour, having long been a committed Sutherland supporter.
Sutherland’s reputation at that time stood very high, and his prices reflected his widespread popularity. His work was admired and collected on the continent, the Italians being especially avid in their pursuit of his graphics, of which there was a correspondingly wide variety. Sutherland lived mostly abroad, and had acquired the status of an honorary European, despite the many powerful landscapes he had made in this country, very much in the English romantic tradition, before the end of the second world war.
It was said by some that he had lost his inspiration by moving to the south of France, and severed an involvement with the spirit of place that had been forged in Pembrokeshire in the 1930s. Actually, Sutherland had already started to go back to Pembrokeshire, and to reconnect with the sources of his vision. He made his first trip back to Wales in 1967, and returned regularly until his death. This new stimulus is evident in the late work, though he never quite reacquired the sustained and effortless lyricism of his early Welsh period.
After his death, as so often used to happen in the art world, Sutherland’s reputation collapsed. Many felt he had been overrated and oversold. He was out of fashion for 20 years, during which time his work was hardly shown in public galleries and good examples of it could be bought relatively cheaply. The last decade has seen a steep rise in his fortunes, though he has not yet returned to his former eminence.
Today British 20th-century art in general is being reassessed, and the big fish such as Moore, Piper and Sutherland are subject to renewed study. Sutherland’s early work is more easily acclaimed, to the detriment of his later career, as was evident from the major Sutherland show in 2005 at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which ventured only up to 1950. More research needs to be done on the whole of his achievement, and the public deserves to see a carefully selected museum retrospective of his later work before judgment can be made. The current, and hugely enjoyable, show at Oxford follows prevailing opinion by sticking to the early work, with a mere trio of later examples (one from 1969, two from the 1970s) to whet the appetite.
The exhibition is curated by George Shaw (born 1966), a Turner Prize nominee who principally paints the Tile Hill housing estate in Coventry, where he grew up. Coventry, of course, is where Sutherland’s great tapestry adorns the modern cathedral, a piece of popular and well-received modern public art that helped to establish Sutherland’s reputation in his lifetime. In a rather idiosyncratic and oddly Blakean catalogue essay (‘the insistent worm Sutherland burrows invisibly and deeply into the mythology of my own imagination’), Shaw dismisses Sutherland’s tapestry as ‘wonderfully irrelevant’. As an art student he was much more impressed by the mass of studies for it in the Herbert Art Gallery opposite the cathedral.
Shaw evidently has his own take on the older artist. He writes that Sutherland was ‘not interested in things, certainly not in things as they are, but perhaps in what they once were and will be, of what they could be…His suns, hills, valleys, roads, roots and skies are not our first encounter with the world around us: it is a secondhand deliverance, used up, tattered, passed on — the marks of its previous owners all too apparent. There is nothing new and nothing finished in Sutherland’s world.’
And then he writes specifically of the works on paper (of which this exhibition is exclusively composed): ‘I see in them the very indecisive and urgent journeying that marks my own daily thoughts and actions both in the studio and the world beyond.’ In other words, this is what you might call a highly personal interpretation.
The theory behind the exhibition is clear from the title, and is confirmed in the other catalogue essays — that nothing in Sutherland’s world is finished. Has it not occurred to anyone involved in this show that drawings and studies tend, by their very nature, to be unfinished? They are working drawings, evidence of the process by which a finished painting is arrived at. Or else — a much smaller proportion — they are drawings made for exhibition and brought to a pitch of resolution so that they can be displayed and sold as works of art in their own right. Our society prizes drawings in a way that would have surprised the artists of previous centuries, who saw them only as a means to an end and rarely worthy of preservation. Sutherland, however, was the product of a fragmented modernist culture, an artist trying to make sense of a landscape literally and metaphorically devastated by world war. His work can be said to deal in fragments, but his vision, his world, is no more unfinished than any other artist’s.
If you can ignore the show’s intellectual pretensions (hardly Sutherland’s fault), this is a fine selection of 85 mostly small works in the huge white barn-like upstairs space of the museum, and three smaller rooms off. The best drawings are in the big room: swarms of dabs or cup-shaped brush-marks, scrawls and extended stabs of pen-line, brushy areas of soft colour, poignant but somehow dingy — green-blue, ochres, fawns, grey-blue, dim yellow. This is the landscape explored through the mind, allowing all sorts of levels and degrees of interpretation from the stagy to the neurotic. The sun sets between hills, yet the space conjured up is at once compelling and unconvincing, the overlays of watercolour wash blurring forms and outlines into a subfusc vibrancy. Dark traceries of ink huddle round colour accents in crayon or pastel, like flashes of light or tongues of flame. Here is richness, here is energy — in one of most rewarding exhibitions I’ve seen in months.
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