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| Publications : Chapters
in Books Paul Gough ‘Graham Sutherland in Context: War, Art and the Commissioning Schemes' Catalogue essay to accompany: From Darkness into Light: Graham Sutherland: Mining, Metal and Machines for Penlee House Gallery_September 2013
of France with army lorries moving through alandscape of bursting shells, a landscape where no bird sang. thing: 'famous ruins ... our historic monuments in their sudden decay ... thebombed city'. The artist of this war, he declared, is 'the Civilian Defence Artist'. (1) And, as had been the case in the Great War, there was no shortage of those who wanted to paint the conflict. Indeed a great many craved the official status of ‘Official War Artist’. The scheme that bestowed such a curious privilege lay under the direction of respected art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, then the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures at Windsor and Director of the National Gallery, London. His War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) commissioned dozens of painters, printmakers and sculptors to make a systematic record of Britain’s war activity. The WAAC was a near replica of Lord Beaverbrook’s innovative scheme in the First World War, which was charged initially with producing eye-witness images for propaganda use overseas, but quickly grew into a comprehensive project for documenting the conflict on every theatre. As the culmination of his programme, Beaverbrook aimed to create a vast Hall of Remembrance in central London, but the project ran out of steam after the Armistice as the country and the Empire tried to leave the war behind. (2) Beaverbrook’s scheme was an extraordinary achievement: one of the single largest acts of government patronage of the arts. It created opportunities for many who had served as combatants at the Front - Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Wyndham Lewis, and Henry Lamb - and melded the work of established artists, such as William Orpen, John Singer Sargent, and Charles Sims, with a younger, avant-garde crowd. The resulting collection - housed at the Imperial war Museum in London - is both diverse and impressive, second only perhaps to the Tate galleries for telling the story of British art as it responded to the radical breakthroughs of continental modernism. Clark was equally single-minded. He wanted to produce a significant and lasting artistic record yet he knew there were many constraints, not only within Whitehall departments but also in public taste, and despite his personal preferences he felt restricted by the need to employ artists capable of making representational or illustrative work. Very few of those called upon in the Great War were re-commissioned and a new wave of younger painters, illustrators and printmakers – amongst them Edward Bawden, Anthony Gross, Laura Knight, Edward Ardizzone - were drawn into Clark’s elaborate and far-reaching programme. At the final reckoning the WAAC accumulated over 6,000 pieces of art produced by 300 Official War Artists.(3) Under Clark’s systematic regime most art was ‘made to order’, and although some artists were given commissioned rank and loosely attached to a fighting unit, their output was constantly tailored towards producing a particular portfolio of images. In the Great War, the first wave of official artists had been given honorary rank, a vague brief and allowed to roam at will. All this changed as the Beaverbrook reforms took hold and selected artists were required to conform to an ambitious scheme for the Hall of Remembrance. Some impressive pieces resulted but - as in the Second World War - it also produced an air of conformity; a number of the younger Modernist artists felt cowed by the strictures of the commissioning process; others felt the constraints irksome, even if on occasion it did result in some impressive art. Wyndham Lewis - not one to paint to order – described one of his largest official canvases A Canadian Gun-Pit as ‘one of the dullest good pictures on earth’, a compromise between his experiences, his intentions and the restrictions of the brief. (4) In both wars the government’s zeal to make a complete record of military activities also bred an atmosphere of casual overproduction. Managing the official art schemes of both wars required logistical prowess, administrative dexterity and considerable patience. At times this was in short supply on all sides. In 1917 the British Chief of Military Intelligence in France was asked to cater for an increased throughput of visiting artists. He was not much minded to comply. Surely two at a time was ample, he responded, bemoaning their unfortunate tendency to ‘want to sit down and look at a place for a long time.’ (5) For their part, artists in both wars were faced on occasion with some fairly dull and uninspiring subject-matter. The minutes of the WAAC in September 1943 record that the painter Kenneth Rowntree had finally ‘accepted the commission to paint jam-making, which is being done by the Women’s Institute.’ (6) Sutherland - ‘A sort of reporter’ Aged thirty-six at the outbreak of war, and therefore considered too old for active service, Graham Sutherland was one of along list of artists drawn up by Clark as essential to his war art project. As early as August 1940 he had been identified by the WAAC, and required to ‘'stand by to make pictures of debris and damage made by air raids'. (7) Although reassured by committee secretary E.M. O’Rourke Dickey that ‘Our plan has been to leave it more or less to the artists to produce what they think is fair for the fee … and to get the work done at the pace which suits them best’ (8) he was summarily despatched - with a special petrol allowance - to South Wales to begin work for Clark’s committee, a five year programme of postings that would expose him to every face of modern war, and more significantly stretch - and at times tax - his artistic imagination. Sutherland's war art falls into a number of phases, predicated largely on his creative response to the geographical location given him by the WAAC. It resulted in a diverse folio of work, in which each subject, each distinct place had to be handled on its own terms rather than a style imposed on to it. As Douglas Cooper has noted (9), Sutherland had to learn to ‘refrain from imposing his own artistic personality’ onto these new and unique situations. For an artist of Sutherland’s temperament that did not come easily:
In South Wales on his first foray as an official artist Sutherland started to gain a sense of how the war might impact on his art:
However, it was not until he and his wife returned to London to draw the effects of the Blitz in the City and the East End that Sutherland began to appreciate the gravity of the events and his responsibility as an artist. He found the devastation in the City of London 'more exciting than anywhere else' mainly because, unlike Swansea, the devastated buildings were larger and offered more dramatic sights. Emptied of people, the destroyed and gutted blocks took on a quite terrifying appearance, evoking that strange thrilled fascination which is so often associated with the Sublime, a place where the material world met the magical, alluring but hellish, conjuring scenes that were redolent of Dante, a blackened city ‘wrung from the bowels of destruction.’ (13) Yet Sutherland could not afford to be overawed and he drew on his innate self-discipline as a worker to organise his daily regime.
chalks, a pencil - and with an apparent watertight pass that would take me anywhere within the forbidden area.’ (14)
The result is an extraordinary suite of drawings, ’taut, nervy, precarious’ (18) where one can trace the artist's hand as it worked to record the spectacular ruination around him: a spidery ink line weaves across the sketchbook page to delineate the edges of a girder, it ends abruptly changing direction to follow the ragged outline of a fractured building and then coalescing into a cross-hatched matrix of fire-blackened timbers. Dense pools of unmodulated black ink rest alongside precise passages of tightly constructed line. Sutherland controls the chaos. Constantly shifting the focus and pictorial emphasis across the surface of the paper, he teases the eye, disrupting the expected hierarchies of a composition; aerial perspective is forsaken, the frontal space of a view slides into the background as the distance cascades into the foreground. But they are also highly disciplined works. In an insightful essay on the painter’s approach to picture-making, novelist William Boyd notes that the initial serendipitous coup d’oeil that first caught Sutherland’s eye is always subject to his taut discipline. His habitual use of geometric grids when scaling up his initial drawings serves as a means of controlling, framing, and taming those unknowable, pungent, writhing forms that characterise his work. The initial impetus is held to account through a wilful procedure that bespeaks; ‘patience, thoroughness, endless, practice, precision…’. (19) The ‘pathetic melancholy’ of Silvertown With his predilection for isolated grotesque motifs, Sutherland ought to have been disappointed by the uniformity and flatness of the East End of London where the German bombing had levelled the housing around the docks. Far from it, he described how he 'became tremendously interested in parts of the East End where long terraces of houses remained. … [their] great - surprisingly wide - perspectives of destruction seeming to recede into infinity and the windowless blocks were like sightless eyes'. (20) Ever drawn to the anthropomorphic potential of the built and natural world Sutherland became fixated by these iconic images producing many variations on the double row of houses of Silvertown, the view invariably punctuated at its vanishing point by a single large building, or a toothless gap in the terraced row. In such paintings as Devastation: City, East end Street, (21) Sutherland limits his palette to a chilly lemon yellow to describe the husks of buildings which are stranded in great pools of black ink and gouache. His sequence of paintings emit an eerily, slightly fluorescent glow, that may echo some of the discomfort he felt at prowling around these abandoned homes. Indeed, a number of the paintings had to be worked up in his studio with the aid of photographs he had discreetly taken in Silvertown, because it had been difficult to draw in some places ‘without arousing a sense of resentment in the people’. (22) ‘Very mysterious’: the tin mines of West Cornwall As the air raids subsided in London, Sutherland left the abandoned and flattened neighbourhoods of the East End, a place which he later described as ‘tremendously moving... mysterious and sad’, and travelled to Cornwall. He worked in the St Just area for three weeks in June 1942, returning - as was his pattern - to his studio in Kent to work up his preliminary drawings into a suite of six paintings which were submitted to the WAAC in December. He made a further short visit to Cornwall in November to gather further material so that he could complete the six pieces. Despite his fear of enclosed spaces - as an apprentice engineer in 1920 he had once been trapped in a locomotive boiler for several hours - Sutherland came to cherish his time down the mines, it was to prove 'a world of such beauty and such mystery that I shall never forget it. There was none of the urgency of the war in this - unless you can call mining a perpetual war.' (23) His first encounter at Geevor tin mine was indeed memorable:
actual scale of the mine tunnel. (26)
mysterious. Approach associated with noise of boots and falling stones and with approaching light of lamp. Remember light flesh colour derived from light reflected from close walls. (27)
All was humid. The walls dripped water, and the only light was from the acetylene lamps fixed to each man’s helmet. (30) Underground Sutherland evolved a grammar of drawing that explored the intimate relationship of miner to stone, in some pieces their limbs fuse with their compressed surroundings, in others they seem in the act of extrication, emerging fully realised from the bedrock, but in others they seem to have sacrificed their bodily appearance to the mass itself. There is a strong sense in some of these studies that the artist was working at the edge of his ability, as if he is trying to find a way of abbreviating and simplifying the figure without losing some of the specific characterisation that he easily conveys in the portraits he made, drawings he later described as 'splendidly incongruous':
as if they were a kind of different species - ennobled under ground, and with an added stature which above ground they lacked, and my feeling was that in spite of the hardness of the work in this nether world, this place held for them - unconsciously perhaps - an element of daily enthralment. (32) In similar vein, Douglas Cooper claimed that the war work had brought a new force to Sutherland’s use of the figure: his tin miners, 'have the anxious and tense look of creatures in thrall to some monster'. In other work of the strange restless war period - the gutted buildings of London, the twisted metal of the Blitz, the troglodyte world of Geevor - 'they may be grim and terrifying outward manifestations of his passage, but everywhere we feel - even in his absence - the presence of man.' (34) There is something quite frenzied about much of Sutherland's war work - surfaces are agitated, line work is busy and overly energetic, the paint slapped on in intense pools of symbolic colour, texture abraded and scoured. Although compositions are often singular, even monolithic, the painterly approach is wilfully, sometimes perversely, complicated. Rather tellingly, the artist described his war period, in a letter to Julian Andrews, as a 'kind of imaginative-realist journalism which in the nature of things had to be done rapidly without pondering and reflection.' (35) Like many non-combatant official war artists Sutherland laboured under the conviction that he had to prove himself useful, to contribute however slightly to the war effort and to produce a substantial volume of art - in fact, during the five years of his commission, he produced over 150 works, gouaches, sketches, drawings, and oil paintings, although as Clark knew a fair number of the sketchbook and smaller works were never released to the WAAC. Across to France His last official duty as an 'imaginative-realist journalist' was to capture the devastation wrought by the RAF on the rail marshalling yards and the German flying-bomb sites in northern France. He described it later:
In a sketchbook drawing of a German flying bomb depot at St Leu d'Esserent Sutherland took a rather deadpan viewpoint of the bombed site, with its cavernous bunkers of the launch pads contrasting awkwardly with the blackened stalks of trees poking out of the blasted ground behind. In these last war drawings colour is applied sparingly, an occasional ochre wash spread over patches of wax, as if man’s violation has leached every natural colour from the scene. In a final bout of work in France he made a series of rather hurried ink and gouache paintings of the devastated train marshalling yards around Trappes. The mad frenzy of the bombing is conveyed through animated mark-making 'engines standing on end or on their sides, boilers and pistons in strange conjunctions, humps of earth heaved up as if by giant moles.' (37) Just as he had done deep underground at Geevor, Sutherland devised a specific graphic language to match the raucous violence around him. Drawn lines and calligraphic marks are scattered independently of the dominating patches of colour; rounded forms, words and railway emblems are sprinkled across the picture surface, large mechanical shapes fight for pictorial precedence over the pooled swathes of ink and gouache. The machine motifs balance precariously or sink slowly back into the primeval ground, creating extraordinarily potent images. There is little here that evinces hope or recovery, these are images of deadly war and its grim aftermath, riven with morbid symbolism, the isolated non-combatants have an anxious air, the ‘tense look of creatures in thrall to some monsters’ (38) How different then from the troglodyte reveries of St Just, which for all its claustrophobia, clamminess and crowded emptiness drew the very best from Sutherland. His work in Cornwall aroused a new humanly-inspired vision, resulting in optimistic, even heroic images of humans attuned to their surroundings, united in their endeavour, and - as Sutherland put it - ‘ennobled under ground’. Notes: 1 Stephen Spender, War Pictures by British Artists - Second Series, no. 4. 2 For a full account of the scheme devised by Beaverbrook, and his predecessors, Charles Masterman and John Buchan, see Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance (Yale University Press, 2004) and Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (Bristol, Sansom and Co., 2011) 3 The fullest accounts of Kenneth Clark’s scheme is in Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity 1939-45 (Yale, Yale University Press, 2007) and in Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century, London 1983. Clark’s autobiography is also of interest: Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood: a Self-portrait (London: John Murray, 1974). 4 Wyndham Lewis to Herbert Read, 17 December 1919, cited in W.K. Rose (ed.) The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1963) p.102. 5 Charteris to Charles Masterman, 12 March 1917, Imperial War Museum (IWM) Art Department file G4010 / 17. 6 WAAC Minutes file, Art Department file, IWM. 7 Sutherland to Dickey, 3 August 1940, Art Department file, IWM. Dickey was a former Ministry of Education Inspector for Arts and member of the London Group. 8 Dickey, cited in Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London, Faber and Faber, 1982) p.99 9 Douglas Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland. (London, David McKay, 1961).p.27. Sutherland’s actual contract as an Official War Artist did not start formally until 1 January 1941, when he began a six-month contract worth £325 payable in three instalments; the payment was contingent on delivery of works which WAAC considered of a standard to warrant payment. All original work and all rights of reproduction were to be vested in the Crown. Thereafter Sutherland was given a series of recurrent six-month contracts. In autumn 1943 the annual salary was increased from £650 to £750. His formal link with the WAAC ended on a rather sour note with petty disagreements over expenses, aggravated when the Ministry of Information would not accept his expense claim for new pyjamas and braces worn during his long war service. 10 Open letter from Graham Sutherland to Edwin Mullins, Daily Telegraph Magazine, 10 September 1971. 11 Sutherland to Mullins, op.cit. 12 Sutherland to Dickey, 1 October 1940. 13 Eric Newton, In My View (London 1950, reprinted from an article first published in December 1940). 14 Sutherland to Mullins, op.cit. Painter George Shaw writes tellingly of Sutherland ‘clocking on for duty’ like many artists of the time who kept long but regular hours, ‘reaching a productive accommodation between freedom and routine.’ In the wartime documentary ‘Out of Chaos’ Sutherland appears rather incongruously in a pin-striped suit while out drawing in a lime quarry in Derbyshire, but wearing a hard hat to underscore his mission as a man engaged with unstinting manual labour. The film ‘Out of Chaos’ was directed by Jill Craigie and released in 1944. 15 Sutherland quoted in Berthoud, op.cit, p.102. 16 Quoted in Berthoud, op.cit, p.102. For further references to this period of his work see Martin Hammer. Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924 -1950 (London, Scala, 2005). 17 George Shaw, Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World. Oxford (Museum of Modern Art, 2012) p.26. Shaw, p.26) 18 George Shaw, ibid., p.27. 19 William Boyd, On Graham Sutherland (London, Bernard Jacobson Limited, 1993). 20 Roberto Tassi, Graham Sutherland: The Wartime Drawings (Milan 1979, translated by Julian Andrews, London 1980) p.19. 21 Sutherland, Devastation: City, East end Street, 1941, Tate, N05736. 22 Sutherland quoted in Berthoud, op.cit., p.103. 23 Sutherland quoted in Tassi, op.cit., p. 70. 24 Sutherland to Mullins, op.cit. 25 Sutherland to Kenneth Clark, nd [probably June 1942], Tate Gallery Archive 8812.1.3.3131. Sutherland had to leave the mines during the afternoons while the mines were closed for blasting, repair and allowing the fumes to clear. 26 Sutherland quoted in Berthoud, op.cit., p. 107. 27 ibid., p.107. 28 Sutherland, Miner Probing a Drill Hole,1942, Tate N05741. 29 Sutherland quoted in Berthoud, op.cit., p.107. 30 ibid., p.107. 31 Letter to Kenneth Clark, nd [probably June 1942], Tate Gallery Archive 8812.1.3.3131 32 Sutherland quoted in Berthoud, op.cit., p. 107. 33 Edward Sackville-West, Graham Sutherland (London, Harmondsworth 1943) p.16. 34 Ross, p 48] 35 [Ross, p 49] 36 Open letter to EM 37 [Ross, p 46] Art.IWM ART LD 5550 38 Cooper, p.26) top back |