Graham Sutherland, O.M.

The Hanover Gallery, London
Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill in 1957 for £100.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

Venice, British Pavillion, The British Council, Exposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, XXVI, 1st June - 30th September 1952, cat. no.41, with tour to Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Kusthaus, Zurich;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part IV- section 4), cat. no.26 (as Standing Form with Pink Background);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no. 264.

The sheet is sound and has been laid down The work is in generally excellent original condition with strong colours throughout. Held under glass in a gilt and painted wooden frame with a canvas mount. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Tracing the development of any of Sutherland's imagery is frequently akin to the process of evolution. Sketches of an object or form will appear, sometimes over many years, the shapes and emphases changing, the mood of the piece altering with the palette and wider setting. Branches, gourds, hanging vegetation and gnarled natural objects all attracted his attention and their rendering into the expressive colours of his post-war palette becomes part of the very distinctive anthropomorphic imagery of his work in the early 1950s.

The present work, a study for the important 1952 painting Standing Form (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), has just such an evolution. Sutherland had begun to produce images of varied 'standing forms' in around 1949 when he became increasingly interested in placing the root fragments he had been studying into a spatial environment. The garden of the house at St Jean-Cap-Ferrat in which he was staying at this time had walls covered with old creepers and by placing these found objects into such a setting he found that they took on an odd and menacing character, influenced by not only the natural play of half-light on objects but also the lost features of weathered garden statuary. As he described to Andrew Forge:

'I hope they were friendly, in the sense that when you see a man standing in a garden – in that curious limbo of sunshine and shadow – you are extremely, delicately, conscious that there is a face there. Then you think there is someone there. Then you think that you recognise the features. But it is this half lost quality which I think tends to make them menacing' (The Artist in conversation with Andrew Forge, reproduced in The Listener, LXVIII, 1962, p.133).    

This experimentation with the three dimensional qualities of such presentation coincided with some efforts at sculptural standing forms at around this time, although very few have survived apart from one piece which was cast in bronze in 1959. However, the very distinctive form of the present work begins to become discernible in the earliest studies for the monumental painting commissioned in 1950 for the Festival of Britain, The Origins of the Land (Tate, London). Several studies for this painting exist, and in many of those for the later stages of the design the distinctive outline of A Standing Form can be seen. In its final form, however, Sutherland simplified the image, rendering this silhouette into a more tuber-like shape.

The monumental quality of the form clearly pleased Sutherland and it re-emerged in the present work and the final oil painting as a very commanding presence, carefully placed against a stark backdrop, allowing one to focus on its varied surfaces and protuberances.