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拍品专文
Painted in 1951, Two Forms in a Terraced Landscape belongs to the vital period in which Graham Sutherland’s language of metamorphic organic forms reached maturity. Executed shortly after his return from the South of France, the present work transforms objects of the natural world – roots, shells and insect forms – into ambiguous presences. These bulbous, animated shapes contrast fantastically with rectilinear, man-made structures and gridlines which appear to cut through the canvas. Together they evoke an uncomfortable tension between natural and constructed; vitality and constraint.
Yellow, pink and green hues combine to produce an astringent yet oddly cheerful palette, adding layers of uneasiness to the already strange bulging creatures apparently crawling from right to left. Together they induce a grotesque yet faintly erotic charge to the painting, a recurring theme in Sutherland’s Post-War imagery. Indeed, the work closely echoes Horizontal Forms in Grasses (1951), where colourful visual language is set against similarly sinister shapes. In turn, they begin to suggest 'emanations of some kind of personality', or perhaps even a split personality ('Landscape and Figures: Graham Sutherland discusses his art with Andrew Forge', The Listener, 26 July 1962, p. 132). Such psychological ambiguities were fundamental to Sutherland’s work of the early 1950s, including his Origins of the Land mural for Festival of Britain, 1951, in which jutting, angular square structures are offset against equally globular shapes. This was a landmark commission that brought Sutherland’s unsettling vision into the public sphere, emblematising post-war regeneration through a distinctly modern visual language.
Sutherland himself described the precarious balance seen in these paintings as 'the tension of opposites: happiness and unhappiness, beauty and ugliness … as with the taste of bitter-sweet fruit' (G. Sutherland, 'Thoughts on Painting', The Listener, 6 September 1951, reprinted in M. Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-50, London, 2005). In Two Forms in a Terraced Landscape we sense Sutherland’s enduring belief that natural forms possess a kind of presence: the projection of human or animal attributes onto natural elements. The result is a painting that is both visually arresting and psychologically charged, embodying the complex dualities that define Sutherland’s mature style.
Yellow, pink and green hues combine to produce an astringent yet oddly cheerful palette, adding layers of uneasiness to the already strange bulging creatures apparently crawling from right to left. Together they induce a grotesque yet faintly erotic charge to the painting, a recurring theme in Sutherland’s Post-War imagery. Indeed, the work closely echoes Horizontal Forms in Grasses (1951), where colourful visual language is set against similarly sinister shapes. In turn, they begin to suggest 'emanations of some kind of personality', or perhaps even a split personality ('Landscape and Figures: Graham Sutherland discusses his art with Andrew Forge', The Listener, 26 July 1962, p. 132). Such psychological ambiguities were fundamental to Sutherland’s work of the early 1950s, including his Origins of the Land mural for Festival of Britain, 1951, in which jutting, angular square structures are offset against equally globular shapes. This was a landmark commission that brought Sutherland’s unsettling vision into the public sphere, emblematising post-war regeneration through a distinctly modern visual language.
Sutherland himself described the precarious balance seen in these paintings as 'the tension of opposites: happiness and unhappiness, beauty and ugliness … as with the taste of bitter-sweet fruit' (G. Sutherland, 'Thoughts on Painting', The Listener, 6 September 1951, reprinted in M. Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-50, London, 2005). In Two Forms in a Terraced Landscape we sense Sutherland’s enduring belief that natural forms possess a kind of presence: the projection of human or animal attributes onto natural elements. The result is a painting that is both visually arresting and psychologically charged, embodying the complex dualities that define Sutherland’s mature style.