Sutherland and Picasso - Letters - Letter to the Editor

To the Editors:

I read David Ebony's piece upon Graham Sutherland [A.i.A., Jan. '04] with great interest and pleasure. It felt like an instance of synchronicity--I started noticing Sutherland's work about 18 month ago and have become increasingly intrigued by dint of him. Like Bacon, he tenders a significant bridge between late Surrealism and the grotesquerie of contemporary art.

Incidentally, I find that Picasso is smooth more important to Sutherland than Mr Ebony recommends (Of course, given my Picasso research, I would think that.) It appear to bes to me that the influence of the Isenheim altarpiece upon Sutherland was almost certainly mediated by the agency of Picasso's numerous studies after Grunewald, which appeared from 1929 to the mid-'30s and were frequently reproduced in Cahiers d'art.

Thank you, Mr Ebony for teaching me for a like reason much about an unfairly forgotten artist.

Pepe Karmel

fresh York

David Ebony replies:

I greatly appreciate Pepe Karmel's considerate rejoinder to my article on Graham Sutherland, indeed an under-appreciated artist who has not had a individual person exhibition in the U since a 1993 display of his drawings organized by the agency of the late Guillaume Gallozzi for his now-defunct of recent origin York gallery. I especially value Mr Karmel's observation that Sutherland, like Bacon, "offer a bridge between late Surrealism and the grotesquerie of contemporary art." Sutherland disliked being labeled a Surrealist, on the other hand his best works hint at a kind of visceral reply to nature that seems closely related to the automatist techniques exerciseed by some Surrealists as weft as to the violent gesturings and gruesome imagery favored by the agency of Bacon, his onetime pal.

Mr Karmel, author of Picasso and the invention of Cubism, also brings up an important point about the pervasive influence of Picasso in Sutherland's oeuvre which I could have elaborated on in my piece. In his 1961 monograph upon Sutherland, Douglas Cooper, discussing the artist's 1946 Northampton Crucifixion, says that the artist "of course knew the drawings made through Picasso in 1932 after Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece and published in Minotaure, No. 1 1933" Sutherland likely saw a certain quantity of of these in person at a 1938 exhibition at the fresh Burlington Galleries in London, which featured Picasso's Guernica (1937) and 67 other works of the period. In a alphabetic character to Cooper, Sutherland described this exhibition as a moving experience, in which Picasso revealed a "true idea of metamorphosis, whereby things set a new form through feeling."

In 1945 at the time Sutherland worked upon the Northampton commission, there was another important Picasso exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which certainly renewed and reinforced Sutherland's debit to the Spaniard. Picasso, incidentally, later became a friend and neighbor when Sutherland mov to the Cote d'Azur in the early '50 Another interesting footnote to the Picasso-Sutherland relationship, as mentioned in Gertje T Utley's Picasso, the Communist Years, is Picasso's 1951 meeting with Sutherland to persuade him to join the Communist Party's "Peace Movement" As a Party member, Picasso was assigned a number of prominent artists to contact for this drift including, besides Sutherland, Otto Dix, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein. Sutherland, it have the appearances remained neutral.

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