Graham Sutherland, O.M.

Marlborough Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner circa 1965

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Graham Sutherland, January - February 1964.

Francesco Arcangeli, Graham Sutherland, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, Milano, 1973, cat. no.45, illustrated.

The board is sound. There is a small crack to the very edge of the upper right corner of the board, and a small knock with a corresponding abrasion to the upper left corner. There are two additional, very minor, surface cracks; one to the left of the smoke stack on the upper edge, and one to the centre of the left edge. The lower left corner is also scuffed. Generally the work is in good original condition, with strong bright colours throughout. The surface is covered with the artist's expressive scratchings. There are one or two flecks of paint loss, and additional scratches to the green background pigment, most of which is inherent to the work. There is a small area of craquelure to the green pigment in the upper centre. Ultraviolet light reveals no apparent signs of retouching. Held under glass in a gilt composition frame with a canvas inset; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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Sutherland was one of the first artists 'recruited' by Kenneth Clark into the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) scheme, and like his contemporaries Henry Moore and John Piper, he initially felt slightly uncertain as to how he might apply his own vision to such a programme.

However, the Blitz on London began in August 1940 and continued, with a high level of intensity, for the next eight months. Lying on the approach to the capital, and home to a vast acreage of dockyards, factories and warehouses, the east end of the city was particularly badly hit and huge areas were laid waste. Sutherland explored the damaged areas and became fascinated by the ways in which the myriad of building materials and the wares within reacted to the intense forces of fire and explosion and his paintings of the east end often acquire an almost anthropomorphic character, such as in Devastation 1941-City: Twisted Girders (Coll. Ferens Art Gallery, Hull) where a broken and burnt metal lift-shaft rears over a broken wall like a wounded beast. He was equally occupied by the whole streets of devastated buildings which ran off into the distance. These images throw up a strong sense of unreality and share with the work of fellow war artists Piper and Moore, and others susceptible to the heightened mental state of the city like John Minton, a feeling of the stage set, a backdrop to some inexplicable tragedy, and the revealed drama of the times.

Following his work in London, Sutherland then travelled to Cornwall where, owing to the scarcity of tin supplies for the war effort, many of the older mines were being either reopened or reworked. Often working deep underground, Sutherland was fascinated both by the setting which with its tunnels and dramatic lighting effects can be seen as relating to some of his pre-war imagery, but also because the miners themselves and their actual business of wresting the ore from the earth supplied him with such powerful subject matter.

Sutherland next found himself in the steel foundries of South Wales, and the combination of the industrial architecture and the almost alchemical processes gave him ample subject matter to create images that are at once factual and fantastical. The technical processes in steel manufacture clearly fascinated Sutherland, and he draws this into the images that he produced. All his wartime work tended to develop from initial sketches through a number of stages until he produced the large-scale final works, very few of which remain in private hands, the majority being given through the WAAC to public collections around the country. Whilst ostensibly dealing with a depiction of an industrial process essential to the war effort, in Furnaces Sutherland has transformed this into a source of wonder, the furnaces becoming something more than just bricks and metal components. Tongues of flame flare out of the apertures, and the whole is suffused in the bright glow of light from them. Like a giant beast being tended, the hoists above are operated by a small figure to the right, and in the background the sense of an infinite space extends far beyond. Furnaces is a companion to a work of the same title in the Tate collection in which the composition is reversed.

This period of Sutherland's work has been the subject of much re-assessment in recent years, as shown by the 2005 exhibition, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Martin Hammer's Bacon and Sutherland published in the same year, his inclusion in the 2012 exhibitions, Picasso and Modern British Art exhibition at Tate Britain, and Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World at Modern Art Oxford. The latter, curated by Turner Prize nominee George Shaw, also demonstrated how the deeply felt emotional engagement in his work has brought Sutherland to the attention of a new generation of contemporary artists.