|
For the British war artist Paul Nash (1889–1946), the wounded, desolate landscape served as a poignant metaphor for the physical and spiritual devastation of the First World War (see our previous newsletters of August 4, 2020 and November 23, 2021). Landscape played a similar role for Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), a British artist of the next generation, for whom nature’s forms had the potential to reflect the unspeakable cruelty and menace of the Second World War. I went into the country. For the first time I started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air. I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became, whilst still retaining their own pricking, space-encompassing life, something else—a kind of “stand-in” for a Crucifixion and a crucified head […] The thorns sprang from the idea of potential cruelty. (Graham Sutherland, 1951, as quoted in Graham Sutherland [London: Tate, 1982], p. 108)
A grid of pencil lines visible in the above work evidences the artist’s process of transferring the composition to the larger, final painting acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1946 (for the final painting, click here).
|
