Sutherland's belated homecoming: renewed interest in painter Graham Sutherland's work has led to a recent series of U.K. exhibitions marking the centenary of his birth - Report From England - Biography

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by David Ebony

During the 1940s and '50s, Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) was widely regarded as Britain's most important painter. In the country's depressed postwar period, Sutherland, along with Henry Moore, was credited with helping to pull British art out of the doldrums of prewar provincialism and into the arena of the international avant-garde. Sutherland's colorful, quasi-abstract canvases featuring spiky organic forms and jagged, shifting planes, often inspired by the rugged terrain of Wales, were viewed by many as welcome antidotes to the staid academicism of much English art of the period. He represented Britain at the 1952 Venice Biennale with a well-received exhibition that toured Europe the following year. And he was one of the few contemporary artists featured in "Masters of British Painting 1800 1950," a sprawling show organized by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie for New York's Museum of Modern Art, which toured the U.S. in 1956.

The London-born painter was also something of a media celebrity, with newspaper and, later, TV reports regularly tracking his activities, from altercations with the Tare director (he was a Tate trustee) to his controversial portrait commissions and his romps with the rich and famous. The publicity was probably detrimental to his career, as it distracted from his core project, which centered on a rather esoteric study of nature. In 1955, at age 52, he left his homeland for good, settling on the French Riviera in a cliff-side house in Menton, built by the English architect and designer Eileen Gray.

From the early 1960s on, Sutherland was considered a doyen of British art, but his later works, collected en masse by several French and Italian admirers intent on covering the walls of their villas with his paintings, were rarely shown in the U.K. His reputation at home was eventually overshadowed by those of his once close friend Francis Bacon and the artists of the London School, such as Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach, as well as by the rise of British Pop and Conceptual art. Sutherland is perhaps better known today in Italy and France, where a number of museum surveys have appeared since his death, most recently in 1998 at the Picasso Museum, Antibes.

To mark the centenary of the artist's birth in 2003, several British exhibitions devoted to his work have helped reassess his multifaceted, unorthodox and often controversial career. These shows, as well as a new half-hour BBC documentary on his life and work, hosted by English critic Brian Sewell, which aired in Britain early in the year, helped to reestablish Sutherland's historical position as well as to uncover the work's new relationship and relevance to contemporary trends in British art.

The series of exhibitions began last February with a 100-work retrospective organized by the New Zealand-born, London-based critic and curator Angus Stewart for the annual Olympia Fine Art Fair, an AXA-sponsored event held at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre. This show, which ran for only a week, constituted the first major Sutherland survey in Britain since a 1982 Tate retrospective. The Olympia exhibition was followed by a smaller but longer-running museum survey at the Pallant House Gallery, in Chichester, plus solo shows at London's Bernard Jacobsen Gallery and the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, which featured rarely seen studies for Sutherland's vast 1952-62 Coventry Cathedral tapestry. Other surveys were recently on view at the Fine Art Society in London and the National Museum, Cardiff, Wales. In addition, Tate Britain devoted a gallery to a special display of some of its Sutherland holdings and hung for the first time since 1982 his largest canvas, the 14-by-11-foot The Origins of. The Land (1951), in the main foyer of the museum's new wing. Cumulatively representing a homecoming of sorts, these exhibitions afforded the British public a comprehensive look at Sutherland's oeuvre for the first time in more than two decades. The works shown ranged from his earliest small etchings to large late canvases, some of which, borrowed from foreign public and private collections, were making their U.K. debut.

Sutherland, by his own account, was born into an unhappy household in an unremarkable middle-class London neighborhood. His father was a lawyer and failed musician who sometimes earned his living as a private tutor (among his notable pupils was future Picasso biographer John Richardson); his mother was a frustrated actress. inadequate math skills thwarted his ambition to become an engineer, so Sutherland convinced his father to allow him to study art at Goldsmiths College, where he concentrated on etching, tie was inspired early on by Blake, Turner and especially the visionary works of Samuel Palmer, the mid-19th-century Nee-Romantic painter whom Sutherland regarded as the English van Gogh. Exploring in his spare time Palmer's favorite haunts in the rolling hills of Kent, he sought his own mystical communion with nature. He achieved early success with small, densely packed compositions such as Pastoral (1930), in which plant and tree forms in a bucolic setting appear transformed into towering and somewhat menacing creatures.