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拍品专文
The present work was executed when Sutherland was travelling from his home in Kent into London every day to record the Blitz damage in his role as an Official War Artist, commissioned by Kenneth Clark.
Of this time, Sutherland later wrote, 'During the bombardment of London, on a typical day, I would arrive there from Kent where we had resumed living, with very spare paraphernalia - a sketch book, black and two or three coloured chalks, a pencil - and with an apparently watertight pass which would take me anywhere within the forbidden areas. It wasn't watertight at all, I was arrested several times, especially in the East End.
And once there I would look around. I will never forget those extraordinary first encounters: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and again a thin tinkle of falling glass - a noise which reminded me of some of the music of Debussy ... Sometimes fires were still burning. Everywhere there was a terrible stench - perhaps of burnt dirt; and always the silence. There was nobody about ... very occasionally there would be the crash of a building collapsing of its own volition.
I would start to make perfunctory drawings here and there; gradually it was borne on me amid all this destruction how singularly one shape would impinge on another. A liftshaft, for instance, the only thing left from what had obviously been a very tall building: in the way it had fallen it looked like a wounded animal. It wasn't that these forms looked like animals, but their movements were animal movements. One shaft in particular, with a very strong lateral fall, suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix' (see R. Tassi, Sutherland, The wartime drawings, Milan, 1979, p. 19).
In the present work, the abstract collage of fragments echoes the eerie chaos of the bomb-damaged streets. Disparate shapes crowd in on one another, disrupting any sense of pictorial space. Indeed, the artist commented of his Devastation series, 'It's the force of the emotion in the presence of such a subject which determines and moulds the pictorial form that one chooses ... the forms of ruin produced by a high explosive force have a character of their own' (see M. Yorke, The Spirit of Place, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, p. 124).
Of this time, Sutherland later wrote, 'During the bombardment of London, on a typical day, I would arrive there from Kent where we had resumed living, with very spare paraphernalia - a sketch book, black and two or three coloured chalks, a pencil - and with an apparently watertight pass which would take me anywhere within the forbidden areas. It wasn't watertight at all, I was arrested several times, especially in the East End.
And once there I would look around. I will never forget those extraordinary first encounters: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and again a thin tinkle of falling glass - a noise which reminded me of some of the music of Debussy ... Sometimes fires were still burning. Everywhere there was a terrible stench - perhaps of burnt dirt; and always the silence. There was nobody about ... very occasionally there would be the crash of a building collapsing of its own volition.
I would start to make perfunctory drawings here and there; gradually it was borne on me amid all this destruction how singularly one shape would impinge on another. A liftshaft, for instance, the only thing left from what had obviously been a very tall building: in the way it had fallen it looked like a wounded animal. It wasn't that these forms looked like animals, but their movements were animal movements. One shaft in particular, with a very strong lateral fall, suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix' (see R. Tassi, Sutherland, The wartime drawings, Milan, 1979, p. 19).
In the present work, the abstract collage of fragments echoes the eerie chaos of the bomb-damaged streets. Disparate shapes crowd in on one another, disrupting any sense of pictorial space. Indeed, the artist commented of his Devastation series, 'It's the force of the emotion in the presence of such a subject which determines and moulds the pictorial form that one chooses ... the forms of ruin produced by a high explosive force have a character of their own' (see M. Yorke, The Spirit of Place, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, p. 124).