Graham Sutherland, O.M.

Acquired directly from the Artist by the present owner in 1965

Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Mostra Internazionale di Torino (details untraced);
Turin, Galleria Narciso, Graham Sutherland, 14th February - 31st March 1976, cat. no.25, illustrated p.57;
Sasso Marconi, La Casa dell'Arte, Il Fantastico nell'Arte, November - December 1980, cat. no.3712.

Original canvas. The canvas is sound. Unexamined out of the frame, there appear to be one or two very minor areas of frame abrasion. There is a tiny push in the lower left quadrant towards the centre of the work. There is a minor scratch to the surface in the upper right corner and a further tiny scratch near the upper left edge. There are a few areas of rubbing to the green pigment in places. There are very small specks of studio detritus throughout the work, and one or two of the impasto elements are very slightly flattened. There is a light layer of surface dirt in places. Subject to the above the work is in excellent overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of restoration or retouching. The work is framed within a gilt and black painted molded wood frame with a canvas rebate under glass. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'I thought I had exhausted what the countryside had to offer both as a "vocabulary" & as inspiration. I was sadly mistaken...'

(Graham Sutherland, letter of 17th March 1976, quoted in Sutherland in Wales, Alistair McAlpine, London, 1976, p.6).

After the Second World War, Sutherland left behind the softly curling branches of his earlier compositions – images which, inspired by William Blake, had brought him fame and recognition in London as a Neo-Romanticist. He evolved a tortured brutality that aligned himself even more closely with contemporaries such as Francis Bacon and would later cement his reputation as an artist whose visual creations would come to define the cultural landscape of post-war Britain. Both artists fully appreciated the importance of a visible brutality in painting and conceived that art could no longer rest on its laurels, and instead should challenge and tackle the viewer head on.  As such they retained a lasting preoccupation with anthropomorphic figures which show just the beginnings of a twisted distortion, such as that depicted in Form with Upstretched Arms.

As an artist who explored the inner psyche, adapting and manipulating the subject before him to expand on broader inner questions, he exposed himself to an international audience: his first solo show outside of Britain was held in 1946 at the Buchholz Gallery in New York. However his art was firmly rooted in the British rural landscape, specifically that of the St. David’s peninsula in south Wales, and natural forms were nearly always the starting point for his work. Sutherland would derive inspiration from fallen trees, branches, gorse, thorns or rocks and then manipulate those forms to create powerful images from his imagination, such as the present work. His later works tend to be executed on a larger and more imposing scale than his earlier pieces – it is likely that his period as a sought after portrait artist in the 1950s encouraged him to scale up the figures to approaching ‘life-size’. Form with Upstretched Arms represents a return to form for Sutherland, who for the previous decade had been working on more figurative images, and a return to the natural world which was his original and most powerful inspiration.