Graham Sutherland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Graham Vivian Sutherland (born August 24, 1903 in Streatham , London , † February 17, 1980 ibid) was a British painter . He has made numerous expressionist paintings. His painting was characterized by abstract-surrealistic elements. He later became known as a portrait painter.

life and work

Graham Vivian Sutherland, son of a London lawyer, received his education at Epsom College in Surrey . He trained as an engineer at the Midland Railway Works in Derby from 1920 to 1921, before studying etching from 1921 to 1926 at Goldsmith's College School of Art in London. Here he was trained primarily in graphic techniques. From 1927 to 1929 he taught graphic techniques at the Chelsea School of Art .

After converting to Roman Catholicism in 1926, he married Kathleen Barry in 1927. His actual painting activity began in 1935. He mainly painted landscape paintings and showed in his work an affinity for the works of Paul Nash . Above all in the gloomy moors, in the desert stone fields of the Atlantic coast of Pembrokeshire and Cornwall , he had found a landscape that suited his soul. Sutherland shows in his pictures natural forms, which he abstracted up to echoes of surrealism .

In 1936 he contributed works to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. At the suggestion of Kenneth Clark , Sutherland became an official war painter in the Second World War in 1940 (until 1945) . During this time and shortly after the war (1945/1946) Sutherland met Francis Bacon , with whom he (and his wife Kathleen) became a close friend. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, both painters exhibited their works together several times. Sutherland art was stylistically influenced by Bacon's works in the 1950s. It was Sutherland who introduced the gallery owner Erica Brausen to Bacon; this led to Bacon's first major solo exhibition in 1949 at the Hanover Gallery .

In 1941 Sutherland (together with Henry Moore and John Piper ) had his first retrospective in "Temple Newsam", Leeds . In 1946 he finally had his first solo exhibition in New York in the “Buchholz Gallery”. From 1947 to the 1960s, his artistic work was inspired by life in the south of France, where he met Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse , and where he finally bought the Tempe a Pailla villa in Menton in 1955 .

In the late 1950s, Sutherland began to paint portraits, such as Portrait of Winston Churchill (1954), which Churchill's wife destroyed (presumably at the instigation, but in any case with approval). In 1977, the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major retrospective of Sutherland's portraits.

Graham Sutherland was represented in Kassel with his works at documenta 1 in 1955, at documenta II in 1959 and at documenta III in 1964. The Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover showed in 1969 his lithography episode "bestiary" and thematically related leaves. Important retrospectives of his artistic work took place in the Tate Gallery in London in 1982, in France in 1998, and in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London in 2005. Since 1972 he has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

His younger brother is the numismatist Carol Humphrey Vivian Sutherland (born May 5, 1908 in Menton Park, Surrey, † May 14, 1986).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

Commons : Graham Sutherland  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
  1. ↑ Diether Rudloff: Unfinished Creation. Artist in the twentieth century. Stuttgart 1982, p. 113
  2. ^ Menton - Villa Tempe a Pailla. Retrieved January 23, 2018 .
  3. ^ Honorary Members: Graham Sutherland. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 24, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Sutherland, Graham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sutherland, Graham Vivian (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Streatham , London
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 1980
Place of death Streatham , London