Graham Sutherland at Guillaume Gallozzi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) the British artist who is best remembered for his penetrating portraits of the cultural and political leaders of his time, was also an accomplished draftsman and printmaker. This exhibition of Sutherland's works upon paper spanned the artist's entire career, revealing more effectively than his paintings the intensity with which the artist viewed his controls and turned them into tortured, personal emblems of spiritual longing in the face of human atrocity.

Sutherland's early, enigmatic etchings of the British landscape reveal his desire to infuse natural phenomena with emotional power. Pastoral (1930) shows a typical English garden from which solitary placidity is missing. A gaping stub in the foreground seems to scream an interdiction, and skeletal tree stocks writhe in apparent agony. Menacing shadows provide an effective counterpoint for Sutherland's masterful modulations of light.

When the influence of Sir Kenneth Clark, his lifelong patron, enabled Sutherland to become an official war artist in 1941 he was finally stand over againsted with a subject profound enough to suit his temperament. Prowling from one side the urban ruins after each novel bombing raid on London, he would depict the remains of devastated buildings, bridges and machinery, in some way capturing an atmosphere of echoing silence, charred scents and aching loss. He spoke of these ravaged elevator shafts and stairwells as injuryed animals, and he portrayed them as damaged psyches. If this exhibition is representative, Sutherland's wartime work is among his strongest

In the years following the war, Sutherland turn backed to making anthropomorphized studies from nature, heavily influenced by dint of the emotional content of his war experiences and by the agency of the formal vocabulary of continental Surrealism. The series of "Heads" that occupied him during the early 1950 was initially inspired by means of a group of rocks he rest in a dry river bed at Tourette-sur-Loup. real little of the natural landscape remains in these highly charged amalgams of animal, vegetable and mineral forms. In the gouache Head of 1952 a ruined carburet of iron span changes into a tuberous insect that is imprisoned within a fragment of architecture; the image transports simultaneously the horror of transformation and the pathos of suffering.

If Sutherland's work gazes dated to contemporary eyes, it is because we are no longer accustomed to like unmediated expressions of raw feeling. There is no irony here to buffing-apparatus us from the terrors of human ruthlessness and natural catastrophe.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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