Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Graham Sutherland

Ingres said it takes thirty years to learn to draw and three days to learn to paint. That may be putting it a little strongly, but one can understand the fundamental thrust of his argument: it is to do with delineation, with establishing the primacy of the line in art. And if there is one area of artistic practice where this primacy holds incontrovertibly it is etching, once defined as “drawing at its most expressive.” In etching, the abstract and suggestive qualities of the line dominate and are given a further authority through the medium of printing. Graham Sutherland began his artistic life as an etcher, and it is in that fascinating and meticulous craft, it seems to me, that some of the clues to his artistic personality reside.

In etching there is a freedom denied the engraver, the freedom of the needle running easily over a grounded plate, whereas the engraved line — the burin cutting into the copper — has a necessary precision and discipline, a pondered finality. But every etching is an original drawing. The plate is prepared, the edge bevelled and the surface cleaned, the ground — beeswax and bitumen — is applied. The needle is poised. The implement held in your hand is closer to a nail or a knife than anything else. No pliant brush, no blurriness or shading of graphite or chalk, just a point. And the gesture it makes, its signature, however fluid, however graphic, is still a kind of cutting, a scratch, an incising. There are many variations of technique to be learned, many tricks of the trade to suggest distance and tone and differing effects of light, but etching is, in the end, purely a matter of expressive line.

Those early Palmeresque etchings of Sutherland, with the whole frame filled, dark with the precise scribble of cross-hatching, possess an assurance and mastery of technique that are mightily impressive. Inch by square inch the trees and the hills and the sky are rendered with the needle. The plate is immersed in the acid bath and the exposed metal eroded—“bitten”—according to the artist’s judgement: just a scratch here, the merest graze, here biting deeper, a scar, a furrow formed to hold the ink in a darker seam. But in the final process of etching, luck and experience apply: too many factors are at work — temperature, acid strength, character of the lines — to make for certainty. It is a job to be done indoors in an atmosphere redolent of the workshop rather than the studio. Perhaps this was something Sutherland responded to or even welcomed? He left school at sixteen and was apprenticed to the Midland Railway Works in Derby, where he worked with lathes and rivets, and welded plates to boilers for steam engines, before he quit the industrial world for Goldsmiths School of Art to specialize in printmaking.

Imagine, then, the almost terrifying freedom and immediacy of outdoors after the deliberate procedures of the print room — from the acid bath to the messy application of watercolour, from the permanency of the etched line to the rapid transit of pencil over a sketch pad balanced on your knee. Sutherland clearly responded to nature, as the faintly cod and cosy pastoral of those early etchings demonstrates, but the evident passion of the Pembrokeshire gouaches and oils in the mid 1930s testifies to a deeper liberation. This was not simply a numinous identification with landscape. There is — paradoxically — in that uncertain tremulous line of Sutherland, a liberation of technique. It is as if he cannot believe that the horizons have receded, that the light in the atmosphere is not produced by an electric bulb. Just as the lifer, once released, once through the prison gates, is more likely to savour the demotic pleasures of a coffee in a greasy spoon rather than embark on a holiday in Bali, so too Sutherland’s new freedom never goes all out for the full Romantic orgasm. The focus is precise: the entrance to a lane, the stark contortions of a blasted tree, the prickly grip of gorse on a sea wall. This is not a Turneresque visitation of the egotistical sublime, it is an altogether more cautious feeling-out, a tentative survey of new possibilities, new geometries, new worlds.

The artistic process reflects this exactly. First comes the raw exposure to the subject matter: the roving eye waits to alight on something, anything, that holds it — stone, rock, fissure, fall of water, bole of tree — and the sketch is made on the spot. Then possibly a series of sketches from different angles. A colour wash is added. Back in the studio a selection is made and is then squared up for copying and placing in the frame of the finished canvas. Wordsworth defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Sutherland’s working practice partially replicates this. But there is something dogged about the way the initial serendipitous coup d’oeil is worked up and worked on until its fitness as the subject of a painting is deemed suitable. Patience, thoroughness, endless practice, precision … These are the virtues of the etcher’s craft, and Sutherland transported them to his painting. Keith Vaughan testifies to the example Sutherland presented to a younger painter — the sheer number of hours he spent at work, its relentless daily routine. For those artists who rely on easy afflatus, or a facile or natural talent, or happy accident, a painter such as Sutherland can seem dauntingly intense and an almost shaming rebuke. Everyone else begins to look lazy, an amateur.

Sutherland was born in Streatham in 1903, his family and upbringing redoubtably middle class. He was a day boy at Epsom College (as was John Piper, by uncanny coincidence) which he left early — not deemed intelligent enough to continue to tertiary education — and was pointed at that dependable middle-class career, engineering. Whatever it was that made him want to go to art school and chuck his engineering apprenticeship was probably the saving of him, for there was no precocious talent on offer, no bohemian role model that made him hanker for life as an artist. He was handsome and polite, with a diffident charm, and he married his first girlfriend, Kathleen, a sustaining and vitally important union that was to last to his death. In short, or in superficial terms, there was nothing extraordinary about Graham Sutherland except his vocation. Looking at the life and at the work one can see it as a series of unfoldings, of revelations. The apprentice engineer discovers he can draw, the student masters the technicalities of printmaking, then responds to the vision of Samuel Palmer, which leads him in turn to landscape, where his own vision supersedes and a new style and way of seeing are created.

Even with portrait painting this process repeats itself. An excellent rather than naturally brilliant draughtsman, Sutherland was reluctant to attempt a likeness, yet in relenting to pressure and undertaking a commission to paint Somerset Maugham he produced one of the great portraits of the twentieth century. And continued to do so in subsequent commissions. There is no braggadocio, no easy profligacy in the Picasso manner, no bludgeoning personality, saturnine or sensational. Simply, the work exists, a half century of extraordinary effort.

And at its back, at its root, is that evocative line, the Sutherland line, his style, worth considering in more detail. It is idiosyncratic, unflowing, full of pauses, changes of angle. Not feathery, not sinuous, but quite strong, supplemented by little dashes, dots, squiggles, overlays, hatchings. In the studies for the landscapes the broad ovals and rectangles of black or colour are embellished or bordered with a fritter of pencil or pen marks, small circles, a series of curves to suggest the contoured bark of a tree, nervy shadings or meticulous renderings of the texture of lichen, or the rutted imprints of a country road. These leaves from the sketch pads are heavily worked between the broader, smoother swathes of colour. The swift scratches of a pen — a suggestion of a furrowed field — fringe a wash of green; a freckling of leaf shapes separates two aqueous crescents of ochre; feathery strata, veins in rock, worm between rough squares of umber and aquamarine.

Who can say what it is about an artist’s style that engages? What it is precisely that one responds to? How it pleasures the eye? How does that particular hand wield its brush or pencil or stick of charcoal, and what causes it to make its marks upon the surface in that singular way? With Sutherland I would say that it is this contrast of fiddly penmanship — of the black, the ink or the paint — with the smoother mass of the colour-field. The worrying, jaggy, suggestive line sits against empty calmer surfaces of colour, the tension of the one counterposed by the translucency or the opacity of the other. I am almost convinced this is a matter of instinct — this is unlearned, this is simply how you do it — and it is in these manipulations of pigment that the artist’s quiddity resides. In Sutherland’s case a quick skim through the oeuvre reveals this trope, this strophe, again and again. It is there in Mountain Road with Boulder, 1940, in the thorn trees and thorn heads half a decade later, in the Standing Forms of the 1950s, and the insects and corn cobs of the sixties and seventies. Any sketch, any gouache reveals that this tension, this contrast, is what his eye and his imagination respond to. Even the portraits are a variation of the same theme. The details of the face and clothing set against the broad empty panels of colour that form the background play with the same fecund juxtapositions.

It is not, however, a mere matter of busy line versus tranquil vacancy. With the move from the monochrome world of the print Sutherland’s palette multiplied dramatically, with the result that there are few better colourists in twentieth-century painting, it seems to me. Sutherland could exploit the exquisite harmonies of greens — from apple to moss to bottle — with the same exhilarating subtlety as Braque handled his browns, greys and blues. But his range was never sombre or confined to tastefully complementing shades, and he never allowed the slubby, rainsodden tones of the British landscape to dominate. Sutherland could look at a Welsh estuary on a dull, drizzling day through the refulgent, sunfilled eyes of a Fauve or a Gauguin. True, his pictures took on a more evident mineral brilliance once he was exposed to the glare of the Mediterranean light, but his work was always boldly hued. Terracotta skies, corn-yellow clouds and magenta fields were part of his pictorial world from the thirties onwards, and it was his temerity in this area that perhaps most influenced his contemporaries and is another justification of claims for his eminence. Sutherland produced great paintings from humdrum, readily available material. Fields, trees, rocks, plants, animals. It is not through any heaped-on numinous import that his subject matter is special; it is that peculiar alchemy of line, form, colour and composition that combines on that square of canvas to give it a significance and import.

I want to resist, I suppose, too much neo-romantic baggage when it comes to an assessment of Sutherland. His imagination responded to forms in the natural world in the way that, say, Bonnard’s was fired by domestic interiors or Morandi’s by arrangements of vases and bottles on a table top. In each case it is what that artist does with the material selected that is important, rather than any subtext, philosophy or ideology that might be tacked on later. In any event, dogma or intellectual ambition are almost the first things that a great painting sloughs off on its journey through posterity. If we admire a Boccioni or a Marinetti today, for example, it has precious little to do with the Futurist Manifesto. The power that Sutherland’s work has to enthral or move, disturb or enchant, is a tribute to his particular skill and talent and, occasionally, genius. It fluctuates, as it does in any oeuvre; there are great pictures and interesting ones, some enduringly powerful and some manifestly tired and slipshod (the Standing Form obsession of the fifties and sixties was a very overmined seam), but the qualities that make Sutherland a major artist are there to be seen in the pictures rather than read about later.

In the late forties and early fifties Graham Sutherland was the most famous living British painter. He was not only esteemed by his artistic peers, he also had a renown that prompted one critic to claim that he existed on the same level of public awareness as Brigitte Bardot and Ernest Hemingway. While the public never lost its interest in him — the Churchill portrait controversy, the Coventry Cathedral tapestry, kept him always close to centre stage — his critical reputation began to suffer in the sixties, and Sutherland never really managed to reverse its slow but steady diminution. It is a savage, unfair and inaccurate measure of any artist’s standing, but it does indicate some degree of value to record that, today, a good, late-1940s Sutherland is probably one tenth the price of a good, late-1940s Bacon. Sutherland and Bacon … We will return to them in due course.

The problem with Sutherland’s career is both instructive and minatory and I think goes a considerable way to explain this imbalance and injustice. Any twentieth-century artist’s life is not simply a record of work done, there is also the question of the life led as an “artist,” how the personality is perceived and the extent to which it bolsters or detracts from the work. In a perfect world this would not be the case, and it is true that some artists do manage to maintain a reclusive non-presence and still be highly regarded. But it is difficult, and when the great and the good come calling and the seductions of acclaim beckon, only the toughest egos or the most taciturn spirits can spurn them.

Sutherland charmed people, he was an attractive man, and with his arrival on the scene in the late thirties he was also plainly a major talent, a British artist of international stature painting significant pictures among which were several enduring masterpieces. He attracted powerful patrons: Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, Douglas Cooper, an opinionated and influential art critic, Lord Beaverbrook, and various others. They championed him, and he succeeded and thrived, but, in the way these well-meaning associations can turn into Faustian pacts, his familiarity with a powerful elite came to be a positive disadvantage, especially in Britain. His move to Menton did not help, and neither did his portrait commissions. Maugham, Beaverbrook, Churchill, Adenauer, Helena Rubinstein, and assorted industrialists and foreign aristocrats, however brilliant they were (and his 1957 portrait of Helena Rubinstein is as close to Velázquez as you can get in the twentieth century), gave off too rich a whiff of grandeur and plutocratic influence. There were too many exhibitions, too rapid an execution of canvases to fill up the shows. The public demand, not for the first time, served the artist badly. It is not hard to see why the critical wind shifted so uncompromisingly: changing the terms of reference, any artist today who found himself championed loudly and simultaneously by, say, Nick Serota, Robert Hughes and Rupert Murdoch might also feel that was too much of a good thing. And this was what happened to Sutherland, who, I feel, had unwittingly broken a key rule of British public life that applies to its artists as much as it does to other personalities, whether in show-business, politics or sport: if you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it. A series of critical savagings in the sixties speeded up the undermining of his artistic reputation. Sutherland grew richer (he was charging £20,000 for a full-length portrait in the 1970s), but he was not to enjoy the unrivalled estimation he had experienced in the years following World War Two. Interestingly enough, his greatest acclaim in the last decade of his life came from Italy, where he was widely collected and admired, his reputation as one of the leading artists of the century secure and undiminished.

And the loss is ours, and the shame that we are cursed with pusillanimous critics. The work of the last two decades of Sutherland’s life is wonderfully full and ambitious, the colours richer, the scale larger, a mature extension of the themes and styles first shown to the world in the thirties and forties. The same spiky, intricate, organic forms set against glowing colour-fields, haunting and brooding interiors, marvellous luminescent landscapes that hark back to the charged Pembrokeshire canvases of thirty years previously, and an exemplary body of portraiture that has never really had its due.

As the century nears its end and we survey the past decades of British painting, two figures, I believe, will emerge as dominant influences, major talents who have produced a corpus of work that gives modern British art its true weight and significance in the international arena. One of them is Francis Bacon; the other should be Graham Sutherland. The canonization of Bacon is already under way, and it is hard to argue that this should be otherwise. But when we set Bacon alongside Sutherland, contemplate the oeuvres and assess the respective achievements, the comparison between the two artists is highly illuminating. In many respects the two men were complete opposites, not only in terms of their personality but also in many facets of their art. And in many ways they represent twin poles of artistic endeavour, twin touchstones of taste and evaluation. They seem to have met first in the mid 1930s, and became friends. Sutherland’s star was in the ascendant, but he genuinely admired Bacon’s talent and did a great deal to advance his career during the war. By the mid 1940s they were seeing a good deal of each other socially. In 1946 Bacon based himself in Monte Carlo and suggested Sutherland (and his wife Kathleen) join him there, which they duly did. It was his introduction to the Mediterranean littoral and to the pleasures of the roulette table; both were to prove lasting obsessions.

During the next few years the two men were at their closest, and it was inevitable that a certain amount of cross-fertilization would emerge. On the vexed question of who influenced whom Bacon is commonly granted the upper hand, but attempts to document the exchange precisely are fruitless. Baconian elements appear in some of Sutherland’s works; but there are also elements of Sutherland in some of Bacon’s canvases. Indeed, one could mount a very convincing argument that such major Sutherland paintings as Gorse on Sea Wall, 1939, or Green Tree Form, 1940, completely prefigure the classic Baconian composition — a twisted, tortured, organic form set more or less centrally against bold opaque panels of colour. But such point-scoring is redundant: it is in their dissimilarities that our interest lies.

The list of oppositions is fascinating and extends to their personalities. Sutherland charming and well mannered; Bacon the extrovert roué. Sutherland the devoted husband; Bacon the promiscuous homosexual. The paramount place of line in Sutherland’s work; with Bacon the plasticity of the painted surface. Sutherland making study after study, laboriously squaring up and striving for perfection; Bacon relying on the adventitious moment, destroying everything that hadn’t worked. Sutherland face to face with landscape and nature; Bacon confined to interiors. Sutherland’s passionate response to the natural world in all its forms; Bacon’s brutal obsession with the human condition. Sutherland the master etcher, the portrait painter, technically accomplished; Bacon who claimed “I know nothing about technique.” And so on.

I am reminded here of Archilocus’ ancient and somewhat baffling adage: “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog knows one big thing.” If Bacon is the hedgehog of twentieth-century British painting — and any survey of his oeuvre will illustrate the “one big thing” he knew, the relentless single-mindedness of his art, the one furrow he ploughed almost without deviation from the 1944 Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion—then Graham Sutherland is the fox. And one’s response to both these artists will, in the end, be determined by one’s affiliation to either the “Fox” school of painting or the “Hedgehog,” if I can extend the metaphor. For those who judge that all great painting springs from a fundamental mastery of line, that it is the absolute bedrock upon which all other forms of expression, however free, rest, then Sutherland, the “Fox,” will claim their adherence. For those who like their emotions raw and unadulterated, then the “Hedgehog” Bacon will win the day. From my point of view, I find Sutherland’s achievement the more impressive. Much as I admire Bacon’s single-mindedness, much as I acknowledge the sheer heft of his presence in the history of twentieth-century British art and respond to the visceral force of his canvases, I find the paucity of graphic skill a weakness at the centre of his work. A worry.

Bacon liked to sneer at Picasso and Matisse — the great modern masters of the line — and their talent for “decoration” as he put it. So too did he dismiss Sutherland as their friendship cooled in the fifties and the sixties and as his own stature grew. He likened Sutherland’s great portraits to “Time magazine covers,” a peevish slur in any event, but one that might have more weight if there were any evidence that Bacon himself was his equal, or even near equal, when it came to sheer ability to draw. All artists set out to create a taste by which they may be appreciated, and Bacon’s denigration of those artists who possess this immense graphic gift is highly revealing. Sutherland, who was blessed in this way, was a more generous spirit towards his former friend. But then foxes can always afford to be kind to hedgehogs.

1993