Standing Form, Pink Background

Discussing the forms from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Douglas Cooper (The Work of Graham Sutherland, London, 1961, p.47) comments: 'His fetish-like Forms are, in themselves, essentially unreal, but because they are painted in pseudo-sculptural terms and have human connotations they achieve a potent degree of pictorial reality. It seems strange that during those very years when Sutherland was continuously at work on portraits of vital human beings he should have felt that the only expressive means by which he could bridge the gap between man, the visible world which we all inhabit, and the artist's world of the imagination, was through substitution and the creation of fetishes. But he maintains that he had to have recourse to these weird, magical forms because they gave him 'a sense of the shock of surprise which direct evocation could not do' and because they enabled him to make 'more real' to himself the sensation of being in the presence of other human beings'.