Paraphrasing nature
Andrew Lambirth
Graham Sutherland: A Life in Focus Pallant House, Chichester until II May
Anliother centenary, another reassessent. Graham Sutherland (1903-80) is perhaps the most talented of those British painters born 100 years ago — and numbering John Piper, Eric Ravilions and Richard Enrich among their company — and yet no major museum retrospective has been arranged to investigate his career. Twenty years ago the Tate did a big show, just after his death, and at the point when his reputation, which had probably been riding too high, particularly among his more devoted Italian admirers, had begun to founder. To a certain extent his official reputation is still in the doldrums, and this is now beyond a joke. Sutherland was a fine painter with an original vision, a landscape artist of considerable depth and invention — in short, a major talent ripe for reconsideration.
If the big galleries are neglecting their duty in the matter of showing Sutherland, others are not. There was a substantial retrospective of some 100 items mounted at the Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair at the end of February, but that lasted only a week (for the duration of the fair), and so did not receive the exposure it undoubtedly deserved. Now Pallant House in Chichester has organised a select show based upon its own holdings of Sutherland, which is remarkably thorough in highlighting the artist's strengths and weaknesses.
The exhibition begins with a curiosity — a very early watercolour of Clapham church, executed in 1924, and not particularly distinguished. The fact that Sutherland destroyed nearly all of his early paintings is now explained, but then he did come to painting quite late, working first as an apprentice engineer. Within a couple of years, however, he was experimenting with etching and was heavily under the influence of Samuel Palmer. Two examples of these early prints are here displayed, the rather mystical 'Cray Fields' of 1925, with sun setting behind the hop poles, and the altogether bleaker 'Hanger Hill' of 1929, Sutherland's mature vision of landscape was to be rather dark (was it influenced by the premature death of his young son?), all menacing thickets and ferociously entangled trees.
Sutherland first visited Pembrokeshire in 1934, and it was this experience he credited with making him a painter. He had to respond to the landscape with paint — not simply with line, but with colour and texture. His drawing remained of great importance, seen in many of these works in a fine evocative dotting and mapping of contours (mostly in ink), but to capture the spirit of the place which so impressed him, Sutherland had to teach himself to paint. He swiftly developed a sureness of touch and a robust use of non-naturalistic colour which made his landscapes stand out. His reputation began to soar. The eminent art historian Douglas Cooper, though later to renounce him, called Sutherland 'the only significant English painter since Constable and Turner'.
Sutherland's interpretation of landscape, his particular 'paraphrase' of nature, can be seen gloriously at work in a series of five studies for 'Entrance to a Lane', part of the Walter Hussey bequest. the Dean of Chichester Cathedral who left his very good collection of Modern British art to Pallant House. 'Entrance to a Lane' is prime Sutherland (one version of the finished painting is in the Tate, another is on loan to this show from a local collection), all fluid circling rhythms, lyrical and disturbing. It is suitably and elegantly complemented by 'Landscape Study of Cairns', a gouache from another Pallant House benefactor, Charles Kearley, showing Sutherland at his spontaneous and imaginative peak.
An official war artist. Sutherland depicted the devastation of London (another Kearley picture in ink, crayon and gouache illustrates this), before moving on to his great religious phase, launched by Walter Hussey's commission to paint a Crucifixion. This is Sutherland at his most Gothic, and led him to a series of thorn trees and thorn heads, a fine one here dating from 1947. That year Sutherland moved to the south of France, and jazzed up his palette. Perhaps he tried to be too European, for he lost touch with his Pembrokeshire roots for 20 crucial years and painted such flaccid images as 'Track Junction in the South of France', which is not a patch on 'Entrance to a Lane'. He laboured on the infamous tapestry for Coventry cathedral, painted the infamous portrait of Churchill (a touching oil study for which is on show), and made too many decorative lithographs. Like most artists, he was horribly variable, but at his best he remained a very fine landscape painter and a powerful portraitist. If any key 20th-century British artist deserves proper re-evaluation with a large museum retrospective, Sutherland does.
This is the penultimate exhibition at Pallant House in its present manifestation. After a final centenary focus exhibition, this time on John Piper — another of the artists commissioned and collected by Walter Hussey — the gallery will close while work is completed on the new wing. The elegant 18th-century town house is being extended with a whole new two-floor building designed by Long & Kentish, which will house the collection of Colin St John Wilson on extended or permanent loan. Wilson, the distinguished architect of the British Library, has built up an exceptional group of paintings by the likes of Lucian Freud, R.B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and Michael Andrews — artists he has known well for years. This will add enor mously to the treasures already bequeathed by Hussey and Kearley, bringing the Pallant House collection up-todate, and making it a force to be reckoned with in 20th-century British art. If all goes according to plan, it will reopen in spring 2004.
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