Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World, Modern Art Oxford

20.05.12

and the works created after his put back to Pembrokeshire in the 1970s, a trip that was made to film an Italian television documentary about his work but which saw him remain for two years, having lived in France from the delayed Fifties. This survey focuses instead on Sutherland’s works on paper, those studies and sketches which possess a quickness and fluidity that his finished paintings often be. This may be because, as strange and as unsettlingly as his paintings are, they rarely possess that mysterious and startling anthropomorphism that animate Nash’s business. Sutherland was exhilarated by the “exultant strangeness” of the Pembrokeshire landscape, but the natural forms he painted are fuelled nothing but as much by his imagination. By comparison Sutherland’s finished landscapes can often feel a little stilted, rarely anything like his keenly in the land of the living sensitive, acutely perceptive portraits, a genre at which he excelled.

Source: The Arts Desk