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Lot Essay
After 1947, the South of France replaced Pembrokeshire in Sutherland's affections. Like many of his British contemporaries, he longed to escape the drabness and deprivation of life at home, after five and a half years of enforced isolation during the Second World War. The writer Doris Lessing recalled: 'there is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then ... it is hard to remember how people yearned for France, as for civilisation itself'.1 After a couple of trips to Paris, Sutherland made his first visit to the South of France in April 1947, and thereafter he made regular extended visits, culminating in the purchase of a house in Menton in 1955. He clearly took enormous pleasure in the climate and the landscape, not to mention meeting up with friends like Francis Bacon and gambling in Monte Carlo.
In the South of France, Sutherland encountered very different kinds of light and vegetation, but also an environment as 'primitive' and unspoilt as Pembrokeshire, though one might not think this now. His early trips resulted in pictures of such unfamiliar and exotic imagery as vine pergolas, gourds, palm palisades, banana leaves, and insects, the themes that dominated Sutherland's highly regarded one-man show in 1948 at the Hanover Gallery. Aside from their novel subject-matter, such works displayed a more linear definition of form and a flatter application of bright colour, compared with his previous work, tendencies very apparent in the Turning Form series.
At the same time, this particular image illustrates the underlying continuities in Sutherland's work. The projection of animalistic or monstrous overtones onto a found natural object, which the artist might have encountered in the landscape and perhaps taken home to his studio, is foreshadowed in many works derived from his Pembrokeshire trips, such as the Red Tree compositions of 1936 and above all his disquieting Green Tree Form pictures of 1940 (Tate Britain and British Council).2 Sutherland was prompted to work in this way by the Surrealists' obsession in the mid 1930s with the idea of the 'found object', meaning the chance encounter with, and appropriation of, some item from the everyday world that had the capacity to spark off unconscious fantasies and feelings in the artist and suitably receptive viewers. Thus in Turning Form No 1 a dried and twisted form, presumably deriving from maize corn, turns into a lumbering lizard-like beast, of uncertain scale, sniffing its way forward. Confronted by such imagery, one critic noted dark undertones in the colourful work Sutherland was showing at the Hanover Gallery: '... into this gravely harmonious landscape, Mr Sutherland seems to have brought an obsessive, though unconscious, sense of tragedy ... A world lacerated by wars, pustulent with concentration camps, is hardly calculated to produce idyllic painting ... Mr Sutherland's earlier works seem infused with an almost pantheistic love of nature. He painted Welsh mountains as if they were animate beings with which he identified himself. But now more usually he seems to find in nature symbols of human suffering and cruelty'.3
In Turning Form No 1 and even more in Cigale (lot 80), Sutherland also permitted himself a much closer observation of naturalistic detail than had been characteristic of his work for the last fifteen years, a tendency that a sense of culminated in the first of his portraits (also 1949), which resulted from his meeting with Somerset Maugham at his house at Cap Ferrat. Indeed Maugham's slightly dry and prickly persona is curiously foreshadowed in Sutherland's 1948 painting of a cigale, posed against a bright red backdrop.4
1 Cited in P. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, New York and London, 2001, p. 214.
2 See M. Hammer, Graham Sutherland. Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, Dulwich Picture Gallery/Scala, 2005, pp. 94-95. 3 R. Mortimer, Graham Sutherland's New Paintings, Harper's Bazaar, July 1948, p. 71.
4 Redfern Gallery, London, illustrated in Hammer, Graham Sutherland, p. 163.
M.H.
In the South of France, Sutherland encountered very different kinds of light and vegetation, but also an environment as 'primitive' and unspoilt as Pembrokeshire, though one might not think this now. His early trips resulted in pictures of such unfamiliar and exotic imagery as vine pergolas, gourds, palm palisades, banana leaves, and insects, the themes that dominated Sutherland's highly regarded one-man show in 1948 at the Hanover Gallery. Aside from their novel subject-matter, such works displayed a more linear definition of form and a flatter application of bright colour, compared with his previous work, tendencies very apparent in the Turning Form series.
At the same time, this particular image illustrates the underlying continuities in Sutherland's work. The projection of animalistic or monstrous overtones onto a found natural object, which the artist might have encountered in the landscape and perhaps taken home to his studio, is foreshadowed in many works derived from his Pembrokeshire trips, such as the Red Tree compositions of 1936 and above all his disquieting Green Tree Form pictures of 1940 (Tate Britain and British Council).
In Turning Form No 1 and even more in Cigale (lot 80), Sutherland also permitted himself a much closer observation of naturalistic detail than had been characteristic of his work for the last fifteen years, a tendency that a sense of culminated in the first of his portraits (also 1949), which resulted from his meeting with Somerset Maugham at his house at Cap Ferrat. Indeed Maugham's slightly dry and prickly persona is curiously foreshadowed in Sutherland's 1948 painting of a cigale, posed against a bright red backdrop.
M.H.