Graham Sutherland, O.M.

Mr and Mrs Robert L. Cardozo, Westmount, Quebec
Bought privately by Wilfrid A. Evill July 1958 for £200.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, 2nd - 26th April 1953, cat. no.12, with tour to various US locations;
Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, Expressionism 1900-1955, 1955, illustrated in the catalogue (unpaginated), lent by Mr and Mrs Robert L. Cardozo;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part III- section 3) cat. no.7 (as Christ on the Cross);
London, Redfern Gallery, Crucifixion and Deposition by Graham Sutherland, 3rd - 30th April 1962, cat. no.159 (as Christ on the Cross) (probably);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.252;
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Religiose Kunst unseres Zeit, 1965, cat. no.28;
Basel, Kunsthalle, Graham Sutherland, 5th February - 13th March 1966, cat. no.44;
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Graham Sutherland, 1967, cat. no.17;
Northampton, Central Art Gallery, Art in Northamptonshire, 1st - 29th May 1971 (details untraced);
London, Tate Gallery, Graham Sutherland, 19th May - 4th July 1982, cat. no.132, illustrated in the catalogue p.113.

J.P. Hodin, Giuseppe Marchiori Emile Langui et al., Figurative Art since 1945, Thames and Hudson, London, 1971, illustrated pl.24.

The colours are richer and less yellow than the catalogue illustration suggests. Original canvas. There are a few isolated areas of craquelure, particularly to spots in the upper right quadrant, visible upon close inspection. There are a few small spots of discoloured varnish in the lower right quadrant and a further spot near the lower left corner. There is a very tiny fleck of paint loss to the grey pigment in the lower right quadrant. The surface has recently been cleaned and is in generally good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals pigments which fluoresce that are the hand of the artist. Held in a gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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After having commissioned the monumental Madonna from Henry Moore for St.Matthew's Church Northampton, the Rev.Walter Hussey asked Moore for suggestions as to other contemporary artists who might be able to work within the parameters of a church commission whilst achieving the highest standards of achievement. Moore suggested Sutherland, and at the unveiling of the Madonna on 19^th February 1944, Hussey asked him if he might undertake a commission on the theme of The Agony in the Garden. Sutherland proposed the Crucifixion as a subject as he had already been considering it and this was agreed upon.

This choice of subject may be entwined with Sutherland's friendship and working relationship with Francis Bacon during this period. Whilst Sutherland's prominence and reputation at this time was far ahead of that of Bacon, recent study has shown that the two artists were both clearly working on similar themes and in a number of cases, the influence of the younger Bacon on Sutherland may have been considerable. It appears that as the war came to an end, Sutherland's attempts to pick up the strands of his pre-war work caused him some difficulty and indecision, and it was to actually take him more than two and a half years to produce the final painting for St.Matthew's (fig. 1).

Bacon had shown, to no little acclaim, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate, London) alongside Sutherland's work at a group exhibition in April 1945, and the brutal imagery of this and other paintings of the period, especially Painting, 1946 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, fig. 2)  do seem to have offered Sutherland some suggestions as to how one might take on a subject which he clearly felt, and especially in the aftermath of the war, to carry a huge resonance for the time. He had been particularly struck by the horrific accounts and newsreel footage that emerged from the concentration camps of Europe, and the finished painting, unveiled in November 1946, seems to be an amalgam of these contemporary examples of inhumanity with that of the unforgettable Northern Renaissance masters, especially Grunewald, whose Isenheim altarpiece is a clear influence.

Sutherland embarked on a number of works at this time which drew on New Testament subjects, one of which, The Deposition, resulted in a large and important painting of the same title that was originally owned by Evill and is now in the collection of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

The present work belongs to a group of smaller Crucifixion paintings that Sutherland produced in 1946-47 and which demonstrate a good deal of variance in their treatment of the subject, composition and palette. Presented very starkly against a jade green background, this Christ is a very broken figure, the limbs twisted under the weight of the body, the flesh bruised and stretched. The nails through wrists and ankles are the source of great streaks of red paint which flow down the canvas like drips of bright blood, and indeed the massive nail hammered through the ankles of Christ almost juts out of the picture plane into our own space, emphasising the grinding pain of bodily weight unable to rest on splintered and damaged tissue.

Behind the head of Christ, a dark form appears to drift across the lower half of a disc, surely a reference to the darkening of the sky as death approached.    

However, the anthropomorphism that had been a key feature of Sutherland's earlier paintings was also at work here, and alongside his work on the Crucifixion commission, he had embarked on a body of landscape-influenced paintings which were to draw very strongly on the imagery of the crown of thorns. As the artist explained in a note to Curt Valentin, the New York dealer, for the preface to his exhibition there in spring 1946,

I had been thinking of the Crucifixion...my mind became preoccupied with the idea of thorns (the crown of thorns) and wounds made by thorns.

Then on going into the country I began to notice thorn trees and bushes. Especially against the sky, the thorns on the branches established a limit of aerial space. They were like dividers pricking out points in space in all directions, encompassing the air, as it were solid and tangible. I'd never noticed this before: but all kinds of ideas for pictures started to come into my mind. (The artist, quoted from a letter dated 24th January 1946, and published in Buchholz Gallery, Graham Sutherland, New York, February 1946)

The paintings that grew from these observations are at once images of natural forms and symbols of the horrors that had been experienced by so many during the war years. As Sutherland had communicated the destruction of buildings during the blitz by creating anthropomorphic creatures from the girders and debris that rose from the ruins, so contemporary observers noted that these paintings captured something that was clearly very much current in the post-war psyche, exhausted as it must have been by privation, atrocity, loss and suffering.

In the present work, Sutherland has placed the very cross into just such a bed of vegetation, the thorns of which rise up and surround its base. Indeed the tips of one of the most substantial thorn growths is tinted with the same red blood that runs from Christ's wounds, suggesting that it, like the spear of St.Longinus, has pierced his body.