Graham Sutherland facts for kids

Graham Sutherland (born August 24, 1903 – died February 17, 1980) was a very active English artist. He was famous for his paintings of abstract landscapes. He also painted portraits of important people. Sutherland worked with many types of art, including printmaking, designing tapestries, and creating glass art.

In the 1920s, Sutherland mostly made prints of beautiful, dream-like landscapes. He started with watercolors, then switched to oil paints in the 1940s. His oil paintings of the Pembrokeshire landscape, which looked a bit surreal, made him a top modern British artist. During World War II, he was an official war artist. He painted scenes of factories and industries in Britain. After the war, he started painting figures, like in his 1946 work, The Crucifixion. Later, his paintings mixed religious ideas with natural shapes, like thorns.

Graham Sutherland was so well-known after the war that he was asked to design a huge tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral. This famous work is called Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph. In the 1950s, he painted several portraits that caused a lot of talk. Winston Churchill really disliked Sutherland's painting of him. Later, Lady Spencer-Churchill had the painting destroyed.

Throughout his life, Sutherland taught art at places like Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College, where he had also studied. In 1955, he and his wife bought a home near Nice, France. Living abroad made him less famous in Britain for a while. However, a visit back to Pembrokeshire in 1967, after almost 20 years, brought new ideas to his art. This helped him become known again as a leading British artist.

Biography

Early Life and Art Training

Graham Sutherland was born in Streatham, London. He was the oldest of three children. His father, George, was a lawyer and later worked for the government. His mother, Elsie, was also an artist and musician. Graham went to Homefield Preparatory School and then Epsom College until 1919.

After school, Sutherland started training to be an engineer at a railway factory. But he soon convinced his father that he wanted to study art. In 1921, he joined Goldsmiths' School of Art. He focused on engraving and etching and finished his studies in 1926. Even as a student, Sutherland became known for his excellent prints. Making commercial prints was his main way to earn money in the late 1920s. His early prints of country scenes were influenced by the artist Samuel Palmer.

Artistic Development in the 1930s

In the early 1930s, the market for prints became difficult because of the Great Depression. So, Sutherland started to focus more on painting. His first paintings were mostly landscapes. They showed a style similar to the artist Paul Nash. In 1934, Sutherland visited Pembrokeshire in Wales for the first time. He was deeply inspired by the landscape there.

This region became a source of ideas for his paintings for almost ten years. He visited Pembrokeshire every year until World War II began. Sutherland liked to show the strange and unusual shapes found in nature. He often made them more abstract, which sometimes gave his art a surrealist look. In 1936, he even showed his work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. As the 1930s went on, and Europe faced more political problems, his art began to show dark, twisted human-like shapes coming out of the land.

His first solo exhibition of paintings was in September 1938 in London. It mainly featured his oil paintings of the Pembrokeshire landscape. These surreal, natural-looking paintings of the Welsh coast made him famous as a top British modern artist. Besides oil painting, Sutherland also designed glass, fabrics, and posters in the 1930s. He taught engraving at the Chelsea School of Art from 1926 to 1940. In 1926, he became a Catholic. The next year, he married Kathleen Barry, who had been his classmate. They were always together and lived in different places in Kent. In 1945, they bought a home in Trottiscliffe.

Graham Sutherland as a War Artist

When World War II started, the Chelsea School of Art closed. Sutherland moved to Gloucestershire. From 1940 to 1945, he worked full-time as an artist for the War Artists' Advisory Committee. He painted the damage caused by bombs in Wales and London in late 1940. He also painted the destruction from the Blitz in the City and East End of London.

Almost all of Sutherland's paintings of bomb damage were called Devastation:... They were part of a series to help with war-time messages. They did not show exact places or human remains. Some things appeared often in his work, like fallen lift shafts from bombed buildings. He also painted a double row of bombed houses he saw in the Silvertown area.

The City a fallen lift shaft (1941)

Devastation, 1941: An East End Street

Devastation, 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse

In September 1941, Sutherland went back to Wales. He worked on paintings of blast furnaces. From June 1942, he painted more industrial scenes. He visited tin mines in Cornwall, a limestone quarry in Derbyshire, and coal mines in South Wales. From March 1944, Sutherland spent four months at the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich Arsenal. He created five paintings there. In December 1944, he was sent to France. He painted the damage to railway yards and flying bomb sites. In total, Sutherland made about 150 paintings for his war artist job.

Post-War Art and Famous Portraits

In 1944, Graham Sutherland was asked to paint The Crucifixion (1946). This request came from Walter Hussey, a church leader who supported modern religious art. This was Sutherland's first big religious painting and his first large painting of a human figure. The Crucifixion shows a pale Christ with broken limbs. After this, he made many paintings that mixed abstract shapes from nature, like thorns, with religious symbols. Another series, Origins of the Land, showed combinations of rocks and fossils in complex, abstract designs.

In 1946, Sutherland had his first art show in New York. That same year, he also taught painting at Goldsmiths' School of Art. From 1947 into the 1960s, his art was inspired by the beautiful landscape of the French Riviera. He spent several months there each year. In 1955, he bought a villa near Menton, close to the French-Italian border.

The 1950s and Public Recognition

Starting in 1949, Sutherland began painting portraits of important public figures. These were done alongside his abstract works. His portraits of Somerset Maugham and Lord Beaverbrook are among his most famous. Lord Beaverbrook thought his portrait, which showed him as cunning, was both "outrageous" and a "masterpiece."

Sutherland's Portrait of Winston Churchill (1954) made Churchill very unhappy. Churchill did not want to accept the painting at first. He had wanted the painting to show a made-up scene, but Sutherland insisted on painting him realistically. One historian described it as "No bulldog, no baby face. Just an obituary in paint." Churchill finally accepted the painting, calling it "a remarkable example of modern art." Later, Lady Spencer-Churchill had the painting destroyed. However, some of Sutherland's practice sketches for the portrait still exist.

In total, Sutherland painted more than fifty portraits. Many were of European noble families or important business people. After the Churchill portrait, Sutherland painted others, including Konrad Adenauer and the Queen Mother. This made him seem like an unofficial state portrait painter. He was given the Order of Merit award in 1960, which showed his high standing.

In 1951, Sutherland was asked to create a large artwork for the Festival of Britain. He also showed his work at the Venice Biennale in 1952. From 1948 to 1954, Sutherland was a trustee of the Tate gallery. In early 1954, he was asked to design a huge tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral. This tapestry, Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph, took three years to finish and was put in place in 1962. To make it, Sutherland visited the weavers in France nine times.

Later Life and Renewed Inspiration

Devastation, 1940, A House on the Welsh Border (Tate)

From his portrait work, Sutherland gained several supporters in Italy. He started spending his summers in Venice. However, in 1967, for an Italian TV show, Sutherland visited Pembrokeshire again. It was his first time there in over twenty years. He was so inspired by the landscape that he began working in the region regularly until he died.

Living abroad had made him less famous in Britain. But his return to painting in Pembrokeshire helped bring back his reputation as a leading British artist. Much of his work from this time until the end of his life used ideas from the area. These included places like the estuaries at Sandy Haven and Picton. His work from this period includes two sets of prints: The Bees (1976–77) and Apollinaire (1978–79).

There were big art shows of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951 and the Tate in 1982. Other shows were held in France in 1998 and at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2005. A major exhibition of his rarely seen works on paper was shown in Oxford in 2011–12.

Sutherland died in 1980. He was buried in the churchyard of the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Trottiscliffe, Kent.

Legacy

The main building of Coventry School of Art and Design, which is part of Coventry University, is named after Sutherland. A radio play called Portrait of Winston tells the story of his portrait of Winston Churchill. The same event is also shown in the Netflix series, The Crown. In the show, Stephen Dillane plays Sutherland. This story was also talked about by Simon Schama in his 2015 BBC TV series The Face of Britain by Simon Schama.

Sutherland's artworks are kept in many collections. These include Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate gallery.

Honours and Awards

• 1960 – Order of Merit
• 1962 – Honorary Doctor of Letters, Oxford University
• 1972 – Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1973 – Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, France
• 1973 – Fellow of the Accademia di San Luca, Italy
• 1974 – Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg
• Honorary Member of the Printmakers Council.

See also

In Spanish: Graham Sutherland para niños