by Rick Gekoski
Though Graham Sutherland’s work has fallen into disregard – since his death in 1980 there has been no English retrospective of his work – in 1951 he was at the height of his reputation, and powers. He shared the Venice Biennale exhibition of English art in 1952 with Edward Wadsworth, and had a retrospective at the Musée National in Paris in the same year. His reputation in Paris was, as Kenneth Clark remarked, higher than any English artist since Constable, which may simply show how little taste, or discrimination, the French have for English painting. But in England, too, he was regarded as the leading painter of his time. He was, claimed Douglas Cooper in his 1961 book on the artist, ‘the most distinguished and the most original English artist of the mid-20th century … no other English painter can compare with Sutherland in the subtlety of his vision, in the forcefulness of his imagery and in the sureness of his touch.’
Sutherland’s own description of his artistic disposition is worth citing here. His twisted landscapes, bedecked with thorns (surely generated by his Roman Catholicism), render the apparent beauties of nature in a sinister light:
the closeness of opposites in life has always fascinated me. That is to say the tension between opposites. The precarious balanced moment – the hair’s breadth between – beauty and ugliness – happiness and unhappiness – light and shadow.
The description suggests an affinity with his contemporary Francis Bacon, in some ways an unlikely comparator but a friend of Sutherland’s, and some say an influence. Or might it have gone the other way?
William Boyd, commenting on Sutherland’s Gorse on a Sea Wall (1939) – ‘twisted, tortured, organic form(s) set more or less centrally against bold opaque panels of colour’ – sees clear evidence that Sutherland precedes Bacon in such agonised painting, and is an influence on his development. Bacon rejected the claim in typically camp manner, calling Sutherland ‘such a petty pilferer … She never had the nerve for grand larceny.’ His pictures, he claimed, owed nothing to Sutherland, whose portraits he dismissed as nothing more than ‘coloured snaps’. Indeed, remarks the art critic William Feaver, to a contemporary eye the Sutherlands merely look like ‘Bacons gone wrong’.
Not that Sutherland was known as a portraitist. Indeed, what is often described as his ‘first’ portrait was painted as late as 1949, a £300 commission from Somerset Maugham. The finished painting hung in the writer’s Villa Mauresque in Provence for a time, until Maugham could no longer stand the sight of it and hid it away. It shocked him, he said with some attempt at grace, that ‘here was far more of me than I ever saw myself.’ His friends, deeply offended on his behalf, simply loathed it. Max Beerbohm remarked that at least Maugham would no longer need to be caricatured, while the portrait painter Gerald Kelly remarked that it made him look like a madam in a Shanghai brothel. Yet, seen from a distance of many years, the picture has undeniable quality: set against a burned orange background, Maugham is perched on a cane chair, arms folded, his chin thrust imperiously into the air. His shoulders fall and slope alarmingly, as if he were melting, his scrawny throat cloaked in a scarlet scarf, elongated bony hand laid on the sleeve of a brown jacket, he looks remote and angry beyond any comprehension, including his own, befuddled by loss and age, and decrepitude. And, from what one knows of Maugham’s later years, one might only say: fair enough.
The portrait was not merely representative but captured an inner reality, aimed itself at essence rather than appearance. In this sense the picture is not merely figurative but pre-figurative: an image of the senility, decay and rage that were still to come. This was Maugham as he would be in his dotage, and there was nothing likeable about it. Why should there be? It was, as the artist remarked a little tartly, Art. It is not the painter’s business to flatter, but to render accurately the perceived truths of his sitter’s nature. Sutherland makes the point explicitly:
People today – superficially at least – are much more aware of what they think they look like and others look like: or what they think they look like or ought to look like. I think it is true that only those totally without physical vanity, educated in painting or with exceptionally good manners, can disguise their feelings of shock when confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful image of themselves.
This bit of special pleading begs all the relevant questions – what counts as ‘reasonably’, as ‘truthful’, as an ‘image of themselves’? Sutherland’s major aversion is to the notion that a portrait should flatter, as if this were a form of toadying to the bloated self-image and self-importance of the sitter. No way. It was the aim of the artist – it was his job – to tell the truth. And the truth, by clear if curious implication, is rarely flattering. Lord Beaverbrook, presented by his colleagues with a specially commissioned Sutherland portrait of himself in 1954, could only remark: ‘It’s an outrage, but it’s a masterpiece!’
None of Sutherland’s portraits (others include Edward Sackville-West, Helena Rubinstein and Kenneth Clark) – with the notable exception of his handsome sel/-portrait of 1977 – makes his subject look attractive, or comfortable, much less admirable. They dissect, reduce and diminish. The sitters are viewed with a cold, reductive eye, generated by a relentless Christian vision that strips away pride to expose the frailty of the body with its appalling temptations and disgusting aspects, to test the spiritual reality beneath. All is vanity. Sutherland’s pictures are almost as cruel as those of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud – better painters to be sure, but both equally, if differently, distressed and fascinated by what it is to be a human being. There is nothing fond about them, nothing warm, little that honours the sitter’s nature rather than the artist’s vision.
Hence, I suppose, the Parliamentary panel may not have seen the portrait before it was too late, though reports of it might have reached them, had they asked around sufficiently. I presume they did not. What the selection panel did not do, palpably and culpably, was to consult, not the art world, but Churchill’s own taste. Any visitor to Chartwell would have known that the Churchills had no disposition for the modern, as Winston’s own pictures – both the ones he produced and the ones he owned – testified.
He had thought long, if not particularly deeply, about art. Painting for him was a ‘pastime’, a consuming hobby and source of delight. His pronouncements on the subject suggest the conspicuously satisfied amateurishness of his commitment:
Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.
He began painting after his unhappy departure from the Admiralty in 1915. Art as therapy? His account of that moment is revealing:
the change from the intense executive activities of each day’s work at the Admiralty to the narrowly measured duties of a councillor left me gasping. Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure … And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue – out of charity and out of chivalry, because after all she had nothing to do with me – and said, ‘Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.’
He recalled this period in an essay of 1922, ‘Painting as a Pastime’, which was published in The Strand, and which was reprinted as part of his book of the same title (one of the most popular of his post-war works), which was published in 1948. In the same year he exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy and was elected Honorary Academician Extraordinary, a title that seems slightly equivocal, as if to suggest that the recipient was not a real painter.
He was counselled against publishing the 1922 essay, for which he received £1,000, by his wife, Clementine, who worried that it would irritate professional painters and ‘cause you to be discussed trivially’ – that is, labelled an outright amateur. But, though Churchill valued Clemmie’s advice and frequently followed it, that is what he was, and he made no pretence to the contrary: painting was ‘great fun’: ‘I do not presume to explain h
ow to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.’
He didn’t get much enjoyment out of Sutherland’s portrait. In due course, the festivities and celebrations over, the offending object was shipped to Chartwell, where it was conspicuous by its absence, Lady Churchill having vowed that it would ‘never see the light of day’. Her husband, she said, had always disliked it and it had ‘preyed on his mind’. It was destroyed at her request within a year or two of its presentation, though the family did not reveal the fact until after her death in 1977.
Sutherland described the action as ‘an act of vandalism’, though he acknowledged that ‘I know Sir Winston didn’t like it.’ There followed a sustained, emotive and largely unfocused controversy in the media about whether Lady Churchill had, in fact, been right – or had the right – to destroy the portrait. Too little of the ensuing discussion made the salient point that the picture was a gift that was intended to revert to, and hang in, Westminster. The Churchills did not own it, and mere possession is certainly not nine-tenths of the law, otherwise every time you are lent something, or steal it, you could claim it as your own.
But let us assume that the Churchills did own the portrait, in which case there are several different points at issue, both moral and legal. Broadly framed, the most important question is this: do the rights of an owner of property override those of the public, which may benefit from something the owner has in his possession? You are allowed to destroy an important painting that you own, though it would clearly be wrong to do so. Yet with houses we are more demanding: if you have a house of historical significance, you cannot knock it down, or alter it significantly without consent. It belongs to you, to be sure, but it also belongs in some way to the nation. Should this not also be true of important works of art?
Perhaps the members of the Houses of Parliament might have claimed damages and costs from the Estate of Clementine Churchill, but that would have been unseemly. More interestingly, Graham Sutherland (had he been French) could himself have pursued the matter, for English law (unlike French, which has a key concept of the ‘right of integrity’ of the artist) does not protect artists from the destruction of their work. In any case, what did it matter? The portrait was gone, and no quantity of indignation or lawyers would bring it back.
No, to recover some simulacrum of the finished product there were only two possibilities. First, there were numbers of photographs of the picture, which at least preserved a record of it. Second, and more significantly, Sutherland did a number of quite finished preparatory works for the final portrait, which eventually found homes with collectors and galleries, including our own National Portrait Gallery. The most important of these studies, owned by Lord Beaverbrook, was exhibited at Canada House in 1999. It was regarded by many critics not merely as the finest portrait of Churchill ever painted, but as a masterpiece. But Churchill’s grandson Winston (who was Beaverbrook’s godson) nevertheless refused to be photographed next to the portrait. His grandfather, presumably, would have been offended.
And that, to me, is the point. The Sutherland portrait was commissioned as a gift on behalf of a grateful nation, in order to honour its recipient. It was a misjudgement by Sutherland, I believe, to produce such a grimly realistic portrait for such an occasion, but artists are like that. I think he should have refused the commission, given it the ‘silent veto’ that Churchill once employed when trying unsuccessfully to paint a pale blue sky.
Let me ask you this: if Winston Churchill, more than any Englishman of the twentieth century, deserved our thanks and homage, was it not up to him – or to his wife – to decide if Sutherland’s portrait was acceptable? Surely the purpose of the gift was not to offend its recipient. Suppose the Roman Senate had commissioned a bust of Caesar, to be presented to him when he returned from yet another triumphant tour subjugating the world. Let us suppose, too, that the sculptor had felt it incumbent to tell the truth, and produced a telling image of a bloated and ambitious tyrant, swollen with pride. Can you imagine the scene when the (offending) image was unveiled to the returned hero? Eyes would have rolled, and then heads. It would have been regarded by its recipient not as a mistake, or an example of artistic integrity, but as an unforgivable insult. And he would have been right.
I don’t, of course, wish that a similar fate had befallen Graham Sutherland, but he is as culpable as my imagined artist. His commission, really, was to celebrate, not to tell the truth as he saw it. His painting may well have been a masterpiece, but I believe the Churchills had ample justification to destroy it, though I am sorry they chose to exercise it. (What they needed was a Jenny Gibbs to ferret it away, and ensure its restoration to Westminster.) When I said so, in a lecture at London’s National Portrait Gallery, I invited the audience to vote on whether they agreed with me. The result? Ninety-seven votes that it was wrong of them to destroy the portrait, and one vote that it was justifiable. It’s a landslide!
Presumably, then, I’m wrong? Life is short, and art is long? I presume that is what informed my audience’s perception. If Churchill objected to how he looked in the portrait, in 200 years’ time he will look like that, and too bad? The general position is fair enough, and my audience were probably right. But this was Churchill, and it was painted to honour him, and it didn’t. To me that makes all the difference.
Anyway, you may have located something heated, indeed personal, in my dislike of most of Graham Sutherland’s work, which is not caused entirely by the disrespect that he paid to Sir Winston Churchill. When I was a lecturer at the University of Warwick, one of the obvious ports of call for visitors, friends and relatives was the new Coventry Cathedral, not itself an exceptional building but movingly placed alongside the ruins of the old cathedral, and given a kind of gravitas through the conjunction. The new cathedral boasts an enormous (24m × 12m) Sutherland tapestry above the altar, Christ in Glory, which I was shocked by on first exposure, and came on repeated visits to dislike intensely. It is an absurd portrait, confused and bilious, the figure of Jesus in an anatomically strained position that could be either sitting or standing, but not quite stooping, clothed in an extraordinary garment that looks like a nappy that has morphed into some sort of robe, the lower half of this obscure garment shaped oddly like a beetle’s shell.
The overblown grandiosity of the tapestry may arise because it is based on working drawings by the artist, which were then greatly enlarged by the weavers. What might work on a small scale becomes bloated and obvious on a large one: a slight line turns into a rope, a tiny subtle area of shading into a large blob. Any subtlety is thus lost, and the tapestry achieves its limited power merely because it is so big. On first seeing it, out of respect to both subject and artist, I tried desperately to withhold both judgement and sniggering, and tried to work out just what Sutherland could have intended. Some sort of ‘truth’ presumably. Certainly the size and placement of the tapestry give it an undoubted power. But whatever Sutherland’s aim, the image is a pompous failure, an offence to the eye that diminishes what little aesthetic power the new cathedral itself may possess.
If this is Christ in Glory, I’d hate to see him on a bad day. If the burghers of Coventry had had any sense, they should have sent it back.
And the same goes for the Churchills.
4
A Ghost Story: James Joyce’s Et Tu, Healy
It’s only a fragment, and it is impossible to make any serious claim for its quality. All that is known of the poem – no printed copy exists – are the following lines, with which it presumably closes:
His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this century
Can trouble him no more.
These shards carry a special power for me, as if I first heard them in the nursery. I seem, alas, to have set them on an internal loop to the tune of ‘De Camptown Races’, that catchy chronicle of running and gambling. It drives me crazy when I can’t make it stop:
Can trouble him no more! Trouble him no more!
H
is quaint perched aerie on the crags of time
Can trouble him no more!
(Repeat)
Though the lines were produced by a nine-year-old, no one reading them at the time would have posited exceptional talent, for kids could write like this in the nineteenth century, if they were bright and had the right schooling. Oscar Wilde turned out reams of such stuff, and not only when he was a schoolboy.
I am over-stimulated by such juvenilia, like a bibliographic Lewis Carroll taking snapshots of little persons revealing themselves inappropriately. Is there something creepy about this literary priapism? I am a dealer in rare books, after all, and the blank spaces of this poem are an obsession of mine. I would rather read the unknown rest of it than fill in the gaps of my reading of any major poet, or discover an exciting new one. I am longing to know what opening it might have had, how it developed, and most of all what it looked like.
But what I really want is to own it, this cheaply printed broadside. I’m haunted by its absence, by the faint possibility of its discovery, by the unfinished business of that unpromising text. It is embarrassing, this greed, without scholarly or aesthetic dimension. To be the only person who owns a copy. To show it off, appear in the papers and on telly clutching it, reading its immature lines with as straight a face as possible. Howard Carter, returned from the young king’s tomb, bearing lost treasure.
In the opening chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we overhear a violent family altercation over Christmas dinner, and though the book is a novel I have little doubt that such an event actually took place. Much of A Portrait is autobiographical, and many of the names, places and incidents were taken directly from the young Joyce’s life. Parnell had died only a couple of months earlier, and Joyce’s father (‘Simon’) was in a rage about the circumstances of his death:
