Favourite themes

As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and the scandalously destroyed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Yet there hasn’t been a decent Sutherland exhibition in Britain for more than 20 years, since, in fact, the rather-too-inclusive Tate retrospective of 1982. In the meantime his stock, once dangerously inflated by certain over-eager supporters, has sunk dramatically. This happens to many artists, who go through a quiet period before finding their proper level once the process of critical reassessment has taken hold. Interestingly, it seems not to have occurred to the fortunes of either Picasso or Sutherland’s contemporary Francis Bacon. The period in the wilderness for Sutherland has been surprisingly lengthy.