Art: Say It with Thorns

ENGLAND'S most honored living painter is half a century old this summer, and basking in the rays of glory reflected from a big retrospective show at London's Tate Gallery. In the exhibition catalogue, two of his country's leading critics pay him extraordinary homage. Artist Graham Sutherland, says Sir Kenneth Clark, is "the outstanding English painter of his generation, and in the last 12 years has had a dominant influence on younger artists." Sir Herbert Read goes even further: "Sutherland is possibly the first English painter since Turner who has been bold enough to take up an independent position as an artist, and to maintain it with conviction . . ."

The object of this lavish praise is a lean and elegant Englishman who divides his time between the sun-swept luxury of the Riviera and the box-hedged comfort of his country home in Kent. He has a pretty and helpful wife, and earns the income, as he puts it, of "a high-grade civil servant." He appears to be almost as much at home in society as in his studio, and is not averse to designing rugs, or painting occasional portraits of the great.

But Sutherland is best known for such tortured canvases as his Thorn Trees (opposite), which combines the cruelty and immediacy of Picasso's World War II paintings with a peculiarly British and romantic feeling for landscape. It looks like what Wordsworth might have written if Wordsworth had swallowed a lemon.

Ferocity & Strain. Artist Sutherland is a man who knows how to make a perfect Martini—ice-cold and powder-dry. His paintings have much the same silvery, piercing sharpness, but with none of the Martini's soothing effects. His subjects are full of ferocity and strain. He likes best painting roots, insects, husks, stumps, and most of all, thorns, isolating and enlarging them in his canvases as if he were painting monumental portraits. Beginning with a sketch from nature, Sutherland transforms it into a half-abstract reconstruction of a half-recognizable object.

More articulate than most. Sutherland has no trouble explaining just how he found his own peculiar niche. Raised in middle-class comfort, he first began drawing for his own amusement, soon headed off to art school. There he did so well that, by the age of 17, some of his landscapes, then done in faithful academic style, were hung in the Royal Academy.

For years Sutherland made good money doing academic etchings. Then came the 1929 crash, and the market for etchings collapsed. He spent another seven years searching for an approach to painting he could call his own, and finally found it on a vacation trip to South Wales: "Lying through sheer laziness on the warm shore, my eye became riveted to what it would—some sea-eroded rocks, for instance, which I would notice were reproducing precisely in miniature the form of the inland hills. These and other things delighted me: the twisted gorse on the cliff edge, twigs like snakes lying in the path, the bare rock ... I found that I could express what I felt only by paraphrasing what I saw ... I learned that landscape was not necessarily scenic."