When Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) was asked by his fellow painter John Caxton whether his “paintings were made of two facets, flesh and bones?”, Sutherland replied in perhaps the only way he could as the 20th century’s most innovative Catholic artist: “No, flesh and spirit.”
Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the showcasing of Sutherland’s first works as an artist, setting out in 1923 as a fledgling engraver of English pastoral scenes set in a long-lost Catholic Eden that almost certainly never was. Yet it was the economic depression in the 1930s, and the ensuing collapse of the print market, which obliged Sutherland to convert his proto-Catholic sensibility to the painting of stark and sinister presences – a dramatic transformation with a modern twist, accompanied by Sutherland’s conversion to Catholicism in 1926, which led the esteemed art historian Kenneth Clark to dub Sutherland “the outstanding English painter of his generation”.
Influenced most of all by Pablo Picasso, Sutherland would go on throughout the 1930s and 1940s to develop a self-termed “vocabulary of forms”, its purpose being to “paraphrase” and accordingly “objectify” the spirit of his newfound Catholic faith – a key facet of his art still underrated by art historians today.
Sutherland claimed he “found it quite natural to become a Catholic – it was like coming home”. While his marriage to the Catholic Kathleen Barry prompted his conversion, Sutherland later admitted to the critic Robert Melville that “being present at the enactment of mysteries” at Mass gave him “a curious thrill … The sense of the canalisation of thoughts and energies on so vast a scale dumbfounds me …
“As to the effect on my work – who can say?”
Roger Berthold, Sutherland’s biographer, wondered how a man “so courteous, charming, urbane, delightful” could “produce work so spiky, sinister”. Sutherland’s landscapes do, indeed, possess an elemental and even menacing quality; his still lifes, most especially his anthropomorphic studies of trees, including the frightfully tree-ish Green Tree Form (1940), appear possessed by a presence that is in the most arboreal but also spiritual sense rooted in Sutherland’s Catholic appreciation of place.
An evident and I think telling parallel can be found in such supernaturally charged landscapes as Fangorn Forest and entities like the Ents, each invested with personality and a touch of peril by Sutherland’s contemporary and fellow Catholic, JRR Tolkien.
As Sutherland’s own art developed its sinister edge, an obsession with prickly details within the Pembrokeshire landscape (his great muse) developed, especially gorse and thorns. We see this in such works as Gorse on a Sea Wall (1939), a modernist work inspired by the cubism of Picasso; here, the spines of Sutherland’s stinging gorse even appear to mimic the blazing lightbulb in Picasso’s Guernica, which Sutherland viewed in 1938.
In his own words, Sutherland, like Picasso, sought to personify the “very essence” of his subject “through words of the utmost economy”, moving away from “the enveloping quality of the earth”, in the case of Pembrokeshire, toward the study of “self-contained” forms, including thorns – an unmistakably powerful image for a Catholic like Sutherland.
Indeed, Sutherland later recalled how, venturing forth into the rugged Welsh landscape, he “started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air…
“I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became, whilst still retaining their own pricking, space-encompassing life, something else – a kind of ‘stand-in’ for a Crucifixion and a crucified head.”
This modern rearrangement of a common Christian theme, the Crucifixion, an image that was by then perhaps too commonplace, became increasingly abstract and unorthodox in Sutherland’s work, particularly in Thorn Head (1947) and Thorn Cross (1959) – the former work underscoring, I think, Sutherland’s claim to be the most original and forward-thinking Catholic artist in the 20th century. In Thorn Head we see the self-contained form, the orange thorn, embodying in its “material” the “very essence” of the Incarnation, as well as the cruelty of the Crucifixion, “through words of the utmost economy”, but also, in its sky-blue background, the redemptive message of Christianity.
Referencing his consciously Christian commissions, most notably his 1946 Crucifixion painting for St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton, Sutherland recalled how he had attempted to conceive such a work “with all the history of the Christian religion in art behind it” as an “imaginative work for today”. But Sutherland realised he was also walking a “tight rope”, since he believed Christianity had been “associating itself for so long in modern times with an art of banal and empty sentimentality … unlikely to tolerate new and vital conceptions”. Evelyn Waugh, the noted Catholic writer, for instance, deeming “catholicism the enemy of Catholicism”, in 1945 proclaimed “Picasso and his kind”, particularly Gertrude Stein, to be “aesthetically in the same position as, theologically, a mortal-sinner who has put himself outside the world order of God’s mercy”.
However, Sutherland found affirmation for his art in the writings of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, specifically his 1920 thesis Art & Scholasticism, a copy of which Sutherland kept in his studio. In this work, Maritain claimed that art, especially academic art, had lost sight of its higher purpose, “to carry the soul beyond creation”. Modern art’s saving grace, wrote Maritain, was that it was at least “seeking in the cold night of a calculating anarchy” what Christian art had “possessed, without seeking, in the peace of interior order”.
And there had, indeed, been a steady divesting of the divine in western art; so much so that Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, beholding Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ, exclaimed: “Why, a man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!”
But it was Sutherland’s belief as a Catholic that, while Christ had surely died, he had also defeated death, and this death was re-enacted in churches across Christendom ev-ery day. This was the essential truth that I think Sutherland sought to objectify in his art, via a return to a less academically realistic but nonetheless spiritually alive rearrangement of reality, which, though less realistic, was theologically real.
“To quote Maritain,” Sutherland wrote, “such an art will re-compose its peculiar world with that poetical reality which resembles things in a far more profound and mysterious way than any direct evocation could possibly do.”
If Sutherland’s art does succeed in carrying “the soul beyond creation”, then, it is largely due to his Catholic appreciation of “the canalisation of thoughts”, prefaced in the tantalising passage in John 1:14 – that the Word was “made flesh” – thrilling Sutherland to such an extent that his hairy orange thorn in Thorn Head appears more flesh than thorn, holding within that flesh an incarnational truth that spoke to him within the broader Pembrokeshire landscape.
As Sutherland said, “The Church objectifies the mysterious and the unknown. It gave my aspirations towards certain ends a more clearly defined direction than I could ever have found alone.” And when Sutherland was working on another Crucifixion painting for St Aidan’s in East Acton, the local priest observed him deep in prayer and seeking guidance from God. While Sutherland conceded he was “by no means devout”, his Catholic faith, he upheld, was “almost certainly an infinitely valuable support to all my actions and thoughts”.
When one studies Sutherland’s oeuvre in its entirety, not just his overtly Christian images but also his landscapes and still lifes, one can see how this may have been so and how modern art might help point modern man beyond the perceptible world toward a greater spiritual realm. And one does wonder whether Sutherland pointed his great friend and patron, Kenneth Clark, in that same direction, leading Clark, who had encouraged Sutherland’s studies of thorns in the 1940s, to a deathbed conversion to Catholicism in 1983.
This was surely so for Paul Miller, the Canon of Derby, who studied under Sutherland at the Chelsea College of Art. Indeed, Miller recalled how seeing Sutherland’s landscapes for the first time “amounted to a conversion experience”. It was the most “important step in my life towards finding God through imagery”, Miller explained. “More particularly, it was the discovery of the givenness of God’s world, of its relentlessness, of its secrecy.”
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