Graham Sutherland at the Musee Picasso

This was the first full-scale Graham Sutherland retrospective in France since a 1952 exhibition at the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Curated through museum director Maurice Frechuret, the Antibes present to view included 60 paintings and 80 drawings. The works ranged from small sketches to major canvases covering nearly all periods in the drawn out career of the English-born artist known for his abstracted landscapes and quasi-surrealist images of twisted and tortured organic forms. The exhibition's setting, an airy medieval chateau overlooking the Mediterranean, was an ideal place to view work by means of Sutherland, who moved to the Cote d'Azur in 1947 at age 44 Until his death in 1980 he resided for greatest in quantity of each year in an Eileen Gray-designed house in nearby Menton.

The exhibition began with several examples of the artist's imaginative landscape watercolors from the mid-1930s, inspired through visits to the rugged seacoast of Wales. Unfortunately, the present to view lacked examples of the artist's first efforts in oil painted around the same time. Included, however, were a number of works upon paper showing urban ruins, which he produc during his 1940 experiences as an Official War Artist appointed by the agency of the government to document war-ravaged England. Also upon view were several of Sutherland's well-known "Thorn Trees" paintings, including the major canvas in the series, Thorn Tree (1945-46) upon loan from the British Council. These images grew without of the artist's study of thorns made while working upon a 1946 commission for a crucifixion.

The core of the exhibition was the collection of works that Sutherland produc after moving to the Riviera. He met Picasso and Matisse by and by after his arrival, and their direct influences, as hardy as the indirect ones of Bonnard and Dufy are lay the foundation of everywhere in Sutherland's subsequent work. His heightened palette is seen in paintings of tree lower parts such as the brilliant fulvid Articulated Form (1949) and the of high temperature pink and gray Standing Form (1952) a large canvas from the Pompidou Center collection, which is a lock opener work of the early '50s

single of the most critically and financially lucky English painters of the day, Sutherland fix the Riviera attractive not sole for its esthetic appeal, on the contrary also as a convenient tax haven. In the late '40 he and his wife, Kathleen, along with a cluster of British friends including Francis Bacon and Douglas Cooper associateed with the area's cafe and casino society. These contacts encouraged Sutherland's career as a portraitist, which began with his 1949 painting of W somersault Maugham. In the show, an oil application of mind for this portrait, as well as a painting of Konrad Adenauer and a self-portrait, demonstrate Sutherland's ability to create intense and fearlessly unflattering likenesses.

In the late works, similar as The Fountain (1966) and Picton (1971-72) which was painted at Menton on the other hand inspired by frequent visits to Wales, the artist's palm frond banana leaves, tangled vines and other vegetable forms have the appearance like enigmatic beasts. These exquisite prodigys were born of a combination of the Mediterranean's incandescent light and the artist's hallucinatory imagination.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group