.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Variation on a Theme II is a major work from the moment at which Sutherland's critical reputation, both in Britain and internationally, reached its peak. In 1952 he was commissioned to design the enormous tapestry for Coventry Cathedral, and his show that summer at the Venice Biennale subsequently toured to major museums in Paris, Amsterdam and Zurich. The following year, when the painting was executed, saw major exhibitions in America (Curt Valentin Gallery, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston), as well as at the Tate Gallery in London, whose catalogue featured tributes by Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read. 1954 produced the ill-fated commission to paint a portrait of Winston Churchill.
Variation on a Theme II belongs squarely within the Standing Form series, Sutherland's major preoccupation during the first half of the 1950s. The tone of the series was set by its first major masterpiece, the British Council's Standing Form against a Hedge, 1950, a notably large and powerful picture.1 This disquieting image was presided over by a vertical presence, set frontally within a shallow space and giving off metamorphic suggestions of plant, crustacean, human and even machine forms, as well as more literal allusions to garden statuary. The sinister mood is reinforced by the picture's gloomy, nocturnal lighting. The Standing Form idea allowed him to reassert a strong sense of human content and a darker mood appropriate to times in which memories of the war and the Holocaust mixed with real fears about a nuclear conflagration between the Western and Eastern blocs.
In 1951, the artist himself described the type of impact that he wanted his latest pictures to have on the viewer:
'People ask about my "Standing Forms". What do they mean? They do not of course mean anything. The forms are based on the principles of organic growth, with which I have always been preoccupied. To me they are monuments and presences. But why use these forms instead of human figures? Because, at the moment, I find it necessary to catch the taste - the quality - the essence of the presence of the human figure: the mysterious immediacy of a figure standing in a room or against a hedge in its shadow, its awareness, its regard, as if one had never seen it before - by a subsititution. I find at the moment that I can make these qualities more real to myself in this way. It happens that I find these organic forms best for my purpose. They themselves are emotionally modified from their natural prototype. They give me a sense of the shock of surprise which direct evocation could not possibly do.'2
Such concerns underlay an extensive sequence of variations over the next 2/3 years on the basic Standing Form idea. Like other current works, Variation on a Theme II is a much more aggressive and dramatic picture than Standing Form against a Hedge and conveys a strong 'shock of surprise'. It reads as a modern-day equivalent to a primitive tribal fetish, an affinity made more explicit in the imagery and title of a closely related painting La Petite Afrique, 1953.3 The architectural suggestion in the lower part of the picture may be related to Variation on a Theme I, 1953, which has more dominant machine-like suggestions, and the idea of combining such geometric forms with organic human/animal imagery in the upper part of the fictive 'presence' can be traced back to Chimére II, 1946-47.4 But the most direct parallels to Variation on a Theme II are provided by the Tate Gallery's Head III (fig. 1), another work of 1953, which was itself based on a sequence of Head pictures executed the previous year.5 The treatment of what we are bound to call the head and neck of the two hybrid creatures is the most obvious affinity. However, Variation on a Theme II is also more loosely executed than the comparatively precise Tate painting. Indeed it is in such a work as this one that Sutherland comes closest to the bold, smeary application of paint, as well as the monochromatic, grisaille palette, and the very simple dark backgrounds, with minimal perspectival suggestions, that featured in the current work of his friend Francis Bacon. The two men had been very close for around 10 years now, and the early 1950s was one of the points at which their work converged most closely. Undoubtedly the example of Bacon served to embolden Sutherland, though the mysterious, metamorphic imagery of the Standing Forms is distinctively his own, and more directly rooted in Surrealist traditions than was Bacon's appropriation of photographic sources.
As in this entire group of works, the principal form has a strongly sculptural quality, as though we are contemplating a painting of a sculptural fetish. Indeed Variation on a Theme II recalls Sutherland's own recent experiments with sculpture, especially the spindly, seemingly metalic base.6 The work also has sculptural affinities in contemporary art. Another possible point of reference for Sutherland's reassertion of the static and frontal human presence, with undertones of tragic isolation, was the contemporary work of Alberto Giacometti, which he is known to have admired. Moreover, the combination of archaic and almost scientific fiction connotations in Variation on a Theme II might also bring to mind the three-dimensional standing figures that Eduardo Paolozzi began to produce in the mid 1950s. Such comparisons cumulatively indicate what a central and representative figure Sutherland was in the art world of the time, and also how far his work epitomised the prevailing mood of fear and anguish. Rather like William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), his pictures invited the contemporary viewer to confront the savagery and destructive instincts within themselves, lurking not so far beneath the 'civilised' facade.
M.H.
Elliott Jacques (1917-2003), former owner of Variation on a Theme II, was a noted psychologist and psychoanalyst of Canadian origin. He was educated at the University of Toronto and studied medicine at John Hopkins University before receiving his Ph.D from Harvard. During the Second World War he moved to England. As a social scientist, he is remembered for his notion of 'requisite organization' and the concept of the 'mid-life crisis' is also attributed to Jacques. He married the well-known film star Kay Walsh (1914-2005) in 1949. Walsh, a famous beauty, whose film career spanned over forty years, had previously been the second of David Lean's six wives, marrying the up-and-coming director in 1940.
Variation on a Theme II belongs squarely within the Standing Form series, Sutherland's major preoccupation during the first half of the 1950s. The tone of the series was set by its first major masterpiece, the British Council's Standing Form against a Hedge, 1950, a notably large and powerful picture.
In 1951, the artist himself described the type of impact that he wanted his latest pictures to have on the viewer:
'People ask about my "Standing Forms". What do they mean? They do not of course mean anything. The forms are based on the principles of organic growth, with which I have always been preoccupied. To me they are monuments and presences. But why use these forms instead of human figures? Because, at the moment, I find it necessary to catch the taste - the quality - the essence of the presence of the human figure: the mysterious immediacy of a figure standing in a room or against a hedge in its shadow, its awareness, its regard, as if one had never seen it before - by a subsititution. I find at the moment that I can make these qualities more real to myself in this way. It happens that I find these organic forms best for my purpose. They themselves are emotionally modified from their natural prototype. They give me a sense of the shock of surprise which direct evocation could not possibly do.'
Such concerns underlay an extensive sequence of variations over the next 2/3 years on the basic Standing Form idea. Like other current works, Variation on a Theme II is a much more aggressive and dramatic picture than Standing Form against a Hedge and conveys a strong 'shock of surprise'. It reads as a modern-day equivalent to a primitive tribal fetish, an affinity made more explicit in the imagery and title of a closely related painting La Petite Afrique, 1953.
As in this entire group of works, the principal form has a strongly sculptural quality, as though we are contemplating a painting of a sculptural fetish. Indeed Variation on a Theme II recalls Sutherland's own recent experiments with sculpture, especially the spindly, seemingly metalic base.
M.H.
Elliott Jacques (1917-2003), former owner of Variation on a Theme II, was a noted psychologist and psychoanalyst of Canadian origin. He was educated at the University of Toronto and studied medicine at John Hopkins University before receiving his Ph.D from Harvard. During the Second World War he moved to England. As a social scientist, he is remembered for his notion of 'requisite organization' and the concept of the 'mid-life crisis' is also attributed to Jacques. He married the well-known film star Kay Walsh (1914-2005) in 1949. Walsh, a famous beauty, whose film career spanned over forty years, had previously been the second of David Lean's six wives, marrying the up-and-coming director in 1940.