CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART
Sutherland and Moore IT would be an over-simplification to say that Henry Moore has turned the human figure into landscape, and that Graham Sutherland has turned landscape into a metaphor for the human figure. Never- theless there are profound affinities between the biomorphic presences the two artists have created. Both painter and sculptor have found in the elemental forms of nature a common source of imaginative experience. Moore's figures approximate to bone or sea-worn boulders, their very flesh having turned into stone or baked terra- cotta ; Sutherland's chrysalises and roots range themselves in upright ranks to proclaim to the lazy eye their unity with the life- force of animate creation. Stretching from the opposite poles of humanism and the supernatural, the fields of the two artists have at points overlapped.
The big exhibition of Graham Sutherland's work, which was brought together for the Venice Biennale last summer and has been touring Western Europe ever since, has arrived in slightly amended form (it includes several very recent paintings) at the Tate where, as a major Coronation attraction, it will happily coincide with the artist's fiftieth birthday. It should be seen in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibition of drawings by Henry Moore, "Figures in Space," with the Constables at the V and A, and with some of the sixty-two Gainsboroughs also at the Tate. For Sutherland represents the most recent flowering of the English landscape tradition—that tradition which developed from mere topography and a sensitive romanticism that found poetic and moral truths in the light and shade of clouds scudding across rain-washed meadows, through Palmer's burgeoning intensity and Turner's transcendental visions of glory to the metamorphic monsters of Paul Nash. Self-identification with the elements has become self- identification with the very thrust and texture and tension of the skin of the land and the minutiae of the furious activity upon it.
Gainsborough, remember, used to construct model landscapes of cork and coal and broken stones, sand and clay, mosses and lichens. These, said Reynolds," he used to magnify and improve into rocks, trees and water." Is this so far from Sutherland lying on the warm shore " until my eye, becoming riveted to some sea-eroded rocks, would notice that they were precisely reproducing, in miniature, the forms of the inland hills " ? Throw yourself to the ground, until you lose the sense of human scale, until the whirring of a beetle's wings stun the eardrums with soft thunder and a jumping grass- hopper seems to shake the earth. This is the world of Graham Sutherland. Landscape is no longer a setting for a fete champetre, for the tolling of the angelus, for dreams of classical splendour. It is a savage, cruel world of malevolent forces and mutually inimical activities. Sutheiland's work has, indeed, been held to evidence the death-wish, but this is surely a gross exaggeration of his undoubted expression of the disquiet of our time. The world he has created may never be popular, but it is a major achievement of international importance, and of how many British artists during the past century can that be said ?
His technical antecedents are not difficult to trace. Sutherland's earlier work, in particular, shows him breaking down the visual image of landscape and re-forming it in two-dimensional terms, veil much as Picasso has done with the human figure and with still- life. Increasingly for the last six or seven years the influence of Francis Bacon's exercises in morbid sensationalism has made itself felt, and by so much the surrealist element in Sutherland's expres- sionism may be said to have increased. The exhibition is not fully retrospective, for none of the war paintings are shown. It is really a record, notwithstanding the portraits of Maugham and Beaverbrook, of the artist's developing attitude to nature. In this development a major shift of emphasis occurred immediately after the war when, in connection with his Northampton commission, Sutherland became preoccupied with the double image of thorn tree and crown of thorns. All pretence of recession was dropped ; all the drama of perspective jettisoned. Against a flat wall or a symbolic horizon the fragments of natural forms were set up on pedestals to have their portraits painted, in colours that came more and more to depend upon the strident clash of complementaries. The gain in sheer, raw power is undeniable—the later paintings make a canvas like the 1939 Gorse on Sea Wall look as well-behaved as an old master—but it is equally true, I am sure, that the sense of revelation has communicated itself to the spectator less frequently. It is interesting, however, that the most recent canvases of all are the most electrifying. Variations on a Theme II, almost a grisaille, is a malevolent, watchful presence of astonishing intensity, of a " reality " unsurpassed in its manner because it exists in space.
This particular aspect of man-imagined forms existing in space and setting up a tension between themselves and their surroundings is the theme that links the drawings at the I.C.A. Just as Sutherland's gigantic forms are sometimes rendered even more ambiguous by the introduction of touches of normalcy (the shuttered windows in Palm and House), so in some of these drawings Moore's sculptural beings clash with the " reality " of human beings. So evenly balanced are they that one is left wondering whether it is the statues or the people who have invaded the privacy of the others. This is an admirably chosen collection, which very clearly shows Moore's continuing interest in an aesthetic problem that is outside the range of true sculpture but is yet intimately bound up with it.
Not to be missed : Wildenstein's " Art of Drawing 1500-1950 " which actually justifies the bravura of its title ; Agnew's fine col- lection of Venetian paintings ; the Marlborough Gallery's important exhibition of 37 Courbets ; the Eskimo carvings at Cimpel Fils, the best of which show a compact simplicity of form, allied to acute observation and a jolly sense of humour ; the stained glass in the exhibition of contemporary religious art at No. 45 Park Lane— though the best exhibition of religious art is on the north side of Cavendish Square, where Epstein's Madonna and Child (in lead salved from the war-time fires) may now be seen linking the two Palladian buildings of the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus—the artist's most successful public monument and the best to go up in central London for many decades. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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