The deep fascination for landscape. For nature. For the animal world. Themes dear to Graham Sutherland. An internationally renowned artist (London, 24th August 1903 – 17th February 1980), awarded the Order of Merit in 1960 and Commandeur des Art et des Lettres of France in 1973, he was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1974, the first British artist to win the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize. The Venetian exhibition curated by Roberta Perazzini Calarota, “Bittersweet”, is dedicated to Sutherland. Most of the selected works, especially oils, lithographs and watercolours from the 1970s, are examples of the mastery of the mature style of the London painter, who offered a completely personal contribution to the reinterpretation of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.
His professional and academic education was strongly influenced by technique: encouraged by his parents, he became a technical designer and railway engineer at the Midland Railway in Derby, before dedicating himself to the study of engraving at the Goldsmith's School of Art in London. In 1925 he was admitted to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, while his first solo exhibition at the Twenty-One Gallery in London was followed by a fruitful collaboration with the art historian Kenneth Clark, who, following England's entry into the Second World War, involved Sutherland in the War Artists' Advisory Committee, in order to document "the darkest hour": the ruins of a London destroyed by German bombing, the Welsh mines, the German bomb dumps attacked by the Royal Air Force.
Graham Sutherland, Untitled, 1970, watercolour on canvas. Courtesy Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. Bologna/Paris/Venice
The British artist was influenced by the natural world throughout his artistic career. Initially, it was the Kent and Surrey countryside that guided his scientific study of the landscape, an analytical approach and an extremely detailed rendering of the subject influenced by his previous training as an engraver. Later, it was his long stay in Pembrokeshire, in south-west Wales, that guided Sutherland towards a distortion of the organic element. There he focused for a long time on the strangeness of the shapes of trees, roots, flowers, paths and other landscape elements, deforming them in the wake of a purely surrealist approach:
"It was impossible for me to sit down and make a painting in direct contact with nature. There was really no subject ready for me to paint. I discovered that I could only express what I felt by paraphrasing what I saw."
It is possible, therefore, to understand how Sutherland's landscape painting is constantly dominated by the element of reinterpretation - an encounter between real and imaginary capable of reconfiguring itself as a synthesis of natural and artificial elements - as well as by the fascination for the intense and brilliant colouristic element, which gives his works a lyrical dimension strongly influenced by artists like Oskar Kokoschka and, above all, Matisse, known in the south of France in the immediate post-war period.
Graham Sutherland, Twisted Tree, 1973, oil on canvas. Courtesy Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. Bologna/Paris/Venice
The works on display convey, therefore, the duplicity that, from the beginning, underlies Sutherland’s work: the encounter between nature and technique, the insertion of geometric, almost mechanical elements into the compositions, aimed at demonstrating the fascination exerted by the atmosphere of the industrial revolution. In works such as Twisted Tree (1973) and Road with setting sun (1977) a romantic vision of nature clashes and merges with technique, a union born from a green England, cradle of the industrial revolution.
The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to the Bestiary, completed and published in 1978. The cycle, one of the most famous created by the artist and presented here in its entirety, was born as a series of aquatints imagined as illustrations for the collection of poems Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphèe (1911) by Guillaume Apollinaire.
Cover image: Graham Sutherland, Untitled, 1977, oil on canvas. Courtesy Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. Bologna/Paris/Venice
