Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland OM (1903–1980) was one of the leading British artists of the twentieth century. Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, he developed a highly personal visual language from landscape and natural forms, combining observation with metamorphosis, ambiguity and, at times, a distinctly Surrealist imagination.

Born in London, Sutherland initially trained as an engineer before studying engraving at Goldsmiths’ College from 1921 to 1926. His early reputation rested on etching, and the visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer were an important influence. Falling demand for prints during the Depression led him increasingly towards painting, while the landscape of Pembrokeshire, which he first visited in the mid-1930s, became a lasting source of imagery. Rocks, roots, thorns and vegetation were transformed into mysterious organic forms that hovered between landscape, figure and abstraction.

Sutherland was associated with the British Surrealist movement and exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. During the Second World War he was appointed an Official War Artist, recording bomb damage, industrial sites, blast furnaces and tin mines. These subjects intensified his fascination with destruction, growth and the strange forms produced by both nature and machinery.

His relationship with The Redfern Gallery was established during the 1940s. In 1944 he exhibited at the gallery alongside artists including Paul Nash, Henry Moore and John Piper, and he became a regular presence in Redfern exhibitions and stock during the following decades.

Printmaking provided another important connection. A work by Sutherland appeared on the cover of the catalogue for the first exhibition of the Society of London Painter-Printers at The Redfern Gallery in 1948, an important post-war exhibition devoted to the revival of colour lithography in Britain.

One of the most significant Redfern exhibitions came in 1952, when the gallery presented fifty-three oil and gouache studies for Sutherland’s Origins of the Land. The studies related to the monumental painting commissioned for the Land of Britain pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain and drew upon rock formations, fossils and other geological imagery.

Redfern continued to handle important works by Sutherland throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His work appeared regularly in the gallery’s exhibitions, including Articulated Form in 1955 and Armoured Form in 1964, while numerous paintings and works on paper passed through the gallery during this period.

From the late 1940s Sutherland also emerged as an important portrait painter. His portrait of Somerset Maugham in 1949 was followed by paintings of Lord Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill. The latter, commissioned to mark Churchill’s eightieth birthday in 1954, became one of the most controversial portraits in modern British history and was subsequently destroyed.

Sutherland formed a close friendship with the younger painter Bryan Organ, whose work he admired and encouraged. He recommended Organ to The Redfern Gallery, which led to Organ’s first exhibition there in 1967 and the beginning of his long association with the gallery. Organ subsequently painted Sutherland’s portrait in 1969. Their friendship provides a direct link between two generations of artists closely associated with Redfern.

Religious commissions became another major part of Sutherland’s post-war work. Most important was the vast tapestry Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph, designed for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral and installed behind the high altar in 1962. Its monumental scale and fusion of natural and symbolic imagery made it one of Sutherland’s defining achievements.

Sutherland spent increasing periods in the south of France after the war, where Mediterranean light and vegetation introduced brighter colour and new forms into his work. He nevertheless continued to return imaginatively to the landscapes and organic structures that had preoccupied him since the 1930s.

His work is held in major public collections internationally, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. The Redfern Gallery has continued to exhibit and handle Sutherland’s work, maintaining a relationship that stretches back to the 1940s and encompasses some of the most important decades of his career.