17 George Shaw, Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World. Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924 -1950 (London, Scala, 2005). Indeed a great many craved the official status of ‘Official War Artist’.
#Graham sutherland painter series
We might equally note his gathering interest at this point in ambiguous vertical forms, as in the extended Standing Form series that he had begun the previous year. And, as had been the case in the Great War, there was no shortage of those who wanted to paint the conflict. To the extent that the two main elements in this picture take on anthropomorphic resonances, as perhaps male and female presences, we might see an analogy with Sutherland's Association of Oaks (1940: collection Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), where found tree root forms take on exactly those connotations. Nevertheless, they are not entirely out of line with his mainstream work. At any rate, the rose pictures seem more life-enhancing in mood and more Matissean in idiom than the generality of his work over the last couple of years.
Perhaps Sutherland himself was wary of being typecast. The presence of such qualities was viewed and admired by critics as appropriate to the psychological aftermath of the Second World War. Born on Augin London, United Kingdom, Sutherland went on to study. Over the course of his career, Sutherland’s aesthetic evolved from a more precise realism to focus on disturbing, thorn-shaped caricatures of the world. Yet this particular strand of imagery might seem a surprising choice given the artist's more familiar use at this time of spiky thorn bushes and palms and of gnarled root forms, which served to inject into his work a note of menace and anxiety. Graham Sutherland was a British painter best known for his Surrealist abstractions of landscapes and figures. The present work is a key piece in Sutherlands development as a painter and its importance is partly demonstrated by the number of exhibitions worldwide in which it has been. The Portrait of Winston Churchill was a painting by English artist Graham Sutherland that depicted the British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, created in 1954. 290: this exhibition travelled to Darmstadt, Ausstellungshallen Mathildenhöhe, August - September 1982. As Kenneth Clark’s essay in the accompanying catalogue attests, Sutherland was at this point widely regarded as the most impressive and influential British painter of the day. London, Tate Gallery, Graham Sutherland, May - July 1982, no. The present lot was exhibited at the now infamous ‘Geometry of Fear’ Venice Biennale in 1952. (Kenneth Clark, exhibition catalogue, XXVI Biennale, Venice, 1952). ‘Graham Sutherland is the outstanding English painter of his generation’
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