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Lot Essay
In the Autumn of 1941, Sutherland was sent by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to record steel and ammunition works in Cardiff. The present work depicts the Baldwin Steel works in Cardiff.
Malcolm Yorke comments on Sutherland's series of steelworks, 'Now all his sunset colours could be deployed again in the flow of molton iron, flames belching from furnace doors, glowing crusts of slag and the plop and seeth of boiling metal' (see M. Yorke, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, pp. 125-126).
In his Blitz drawings, Sutherland had been forbidden from depicting people, with the consequence that the ruined buildings and objects began to take on human symbolism of their own. Whilst people are featured in the present work, they are loose anonymous figures, and it is the two ladles at the front which dominate the composition. Sutherland imbued them with human characteristics in this 1971 comment on the steelworks, 'As the hand feeds the mouth so did the long scoops which plunged into the furnace openings feed them, and the metal containers pouring molten iron into ladles had great encrusted mouths' (The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 10 September 1971, quoted in Exhibition catalogue, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery 2005, p. 105).
Two Ladles, (fig. 1) a very similar work to the present piece, was presented by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1947, and was exhibited London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, June - September 2005, no. 57, illustrated.
Malcolm Yorke comments on Sutherland's series of steelworks, 'Now all his sunset colours could be deployed again in the flow of molton iron, flames belching from furnace doors, glowing crusts of slag and the plop and seeth of boiling metal' (see M. Yorke, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, pp. 125-126).
In his Blitz drawings, Sutherland had been forbidden from depicting people, with the consequence that the ruined buildings and objects began to take on human symbolism of their own. Whilst people are featured in the present work, they are loose anonymous figures, and it is the two ladles at the front which dominate the composition. Sutherland imbued them with human characteristics in this 1971 comment on the steelworks, 'As the hand feeds the mouth so did the long scoops which plunged into the furnace openings feed them, and the metal containers pouring molten iron into ladles had great encrusted mouths' (The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 10 September 1971, quoted in Exhibition catalogue, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery 2005, p. 105).
Two Ladles, (fig. 1) a very similar work to the present piece, was presented by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1947, and was exhibited London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, June - September 2005, no. 57, illustrated.