Sutherland and Picasso - Letters - Letter to the Editor

To the Editors:

I read David Ebony's piece on Graham Sutherland [A.i.A., Jan. '04] with great interest and pleasure. It felt like an instance of synchronicity--I started noticing Sutherland's work about 18 months ago and have become increasingly intrigued by him. Like Bacon, he offers a significant bridge between late Surrealism and the grotesquerie of contemporary art.

Incidentally, I find that Picasso is even more important to Sutherland than Mr. Ebony suggests. (Of course, given my Picasso research, I would think that.) It seems to me that the influence of the Isenheim altarpiece on Sutherland was almost certainly mediated by Picasso's numerous studies after Grunewald, which appeared from 1929 to the mid-'30s and were often reproduced in Cahiers d'art.

Thank you, Mr. Ebony, for teaching me so much about an unfairly forgotten artist.

Pepe Karmel

New York

David Ebony replies:

I greatly appreciate Pepe Karmel's considerate response to my article on Graham Sutherland, indeed an under-appreciated artist who has not had a one person exhibition in the U.S. since a 1993 show of his drawings organized by the late Guillaume Gallozzi for his now-defunct New York gallery. I especially value Mr. Karmel's observation that Sutherland, like Bacon, "offers a bridge between late Surrealism and the grotesquerie of contemporary art." Sutherland disliked being labeled a Surrealist, but his best works hint at a kind of visceral response to nature that seems closely related to the automatist techniques employed by some Surrealists as weft as to the violent gestures and gruesome imagery favored by Bacon, his onetime pal.

Mr. Karmel, author of Picasso and the invention of Cubism, also brings up an important point about the pervasive influence of Picasso in Sutherland's oeuvre, which I could have elaborated upon in my piece. In his 1961 monograph on Sutherland, Douglas Cooper, discussing the artist's 1946 Northampton Crucifixion, says that the artist "of course knew the drawings made by Picasso in 1932 after Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece and published in Minotaure, No. 1, 1933." Sutherland likely saw some of these in person at a 1938 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, which featured Picasso's Guernica (1937) and 67 other works of the period. In a letter to Cooper, Sutherland described this exhibition as a moving experience, in which Picasso revealed a "true idea of metamorphosis, whereby things found a new form through feeling."

In 1945, at the time Sutherland worked on the Northampton commission, there was another important Picasso exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which certainly renewed and reinforced Sutherland's debt to the Spaniard. Picasso, incidentally, later became a friend and neighbor when Sutherland moved to the Cote d'Azur in the early '50s. Another interesting footnote to the Picasso-Sutherland relationship, as mentioned in Gertje T. Utley's Picasso, the Communist Years, is Picasso's 1951 meeting with Sutherland to persuade him to join the Communist Party's "Peace Movement." As a Party member, Picasso was assigned a number of prominent artists to contact for this purpose, including, besides Sutherland, Otto Dix, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein. Sutherland, it seems, remained neutral.

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