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Lot Essay
The motif of the vine pergola entered Sutherland’s work following his first visit to the South of France in 1947. So different to the scenery of remote West Pembrokeshire that had sustained his work since the mid-1930s, this landscape informed the format, subject and palette of his resulting paintings. In the present work, painted in 1952, the pergola stretches across the horizontal canvas, its structure asserting the frontality of the picture surface. Meanwhile the rich terracotta palette is resonant of the heat and luminosity of the Midi, hyphenated by the luscious green foliage of the vines. The subject enabled him to develop his style, which is evident from his tightly rendered depictions from a few years earlier, as seen in Pink Vine Pergola, 1947, and Large Vine Pergola No. 2, 1948 (both British Council), in contrast with the much looser and more expressive brushwork seen in the present work.
Yet, for all its lyricism and rich colour, Vine Pergola retains an engagement, albeit understated, with the agonised, anthropomorphic quality of gnarled, twisted forms that the artist had encountered in the natural world. This concern went right back, via the Thorn Head and Thorn Tree compositions from just after the war, to the remarkable Gorse on Sea Wall, 1939 (Ulster Museum, Belfast), the picture that had in effect launched Sutherland's mature art and also his reputation as an artist closely in touch with the despairing atmosphere of the times. One might even discern in Vine Pergola a residual imagery of the three crosses on the hill at Gethsemane. Sutherland's immersion in the Crucifixion commission for St Matthew's church in Northampton (completed in 1946) had already fed into his landscapes in the series of thorn pictures, with their intimation of the crown of thorns.
In 1951, Sutherland spoke about these seemingly contradictory associations and the deliberate ambiguity of his art, calibrated to engaging the viewer imaginatively rather than telling him or her what to think:
'People have said that my most typical images express a dark and pessimistic outlook. That is outside my feeling the precarious tension of opposites - happiness and unhappiness, beauty and ugliness, so near the point of balance - are capable of being interpreted according to the predilections and needs of the beholder - with enthusiasm and delight, or abhorrence, as with the taste of bitter-sweet fruit' ('Thoughts on Painting' (1951), reprinted in M. Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, London, 2005, p. 145).
Yet, for all its lyricism and rich colour, Vine Pergola retains an engagement, albeit understated, with the agonised, anthropomorphic quality of gnarled, twisted forms that the artist had encountered in the natural world. This concern went right back, via the Thorn Head and Thorn Tree compositions from just after the war, to the remarkable Gorse on Sea Wall, 1939 (Ulster Museum, Belfast), the picture that had in effect launched Sutherland's mature art and also his reputation as an artist closely in touch with the despairing atmosphere of the times. One might even discern in Vine Pergola a residual imagery of the three crosses on the hill at Gethsemane. Sutherland's immersion in the Crucifixion commission for St Matthew's church in Northampton (completed in 1946) had already fed into his landscapes in the series of thorn pictures, with their intimation of the crown of thorns.
In 1951, Sutherland spoke about these seemingly contradictory associations and the deliberate ambiguity of his art, calibrated to engaging the viewer imaginatively rather than telling him or her what to think:
'People have said that my most typical images express a dark and pessimistic outlook. That is outside my feeling the precarious tension of opposites - happiness and unhappiness, beauty and ugliness, so near the point of balance - are capable of being interpreted according to the predilections and needs of the beholder - with enthusiasm and delight, or abhorrence, as with the taste of bitter-sweet fruit' ('Thoughts on Painting' (1951), reprinted in M. Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, London, 2005, p. 145).