Pi ctures in Church: No. 484

The Crucifixion. a painting by Graham Sutherland in St. Matthew's church, Northampton (1946).
GRAHAM SUTHERLAND
has always been a creator of images. He has looked into the tire and seen in its heart strange faces that flicker for a moment and then are gone. He has watched nature and the same experiences have been his; the distant hills assumed living forms, the rocks imitated them; severed roots and branches took on the shape of limbs and displayed their wounds: trees clawed the ground like impatient animals; insects reared up and roared and even the world of things has been raised by Sutherland into the realms of symbolic being.
His approach to landscape was never topographical. the superficial view never contented him. The thing seen •was always related to an image-the thing felt.
IT was therefore the most
natural thing in the world that if he could see the world reflected in a grain of sand, he should desire to see heaven as well and turn to a religious theme. The Crucifixion, the theme best suited to the Sutherland vision. was the one which he was requested to paint.
Just as he found in sticks and stones significant things about
human life, so in the skeleton of a Spanish "crucifix fish" in his possession he discovered the first ideas for his Crucifixion mural.
GRUNEWALD'S great Cruci fixion at Colmar provided the mood for the Sutherland Crucifixion which resembles Grunewald's in its approach. Both artists (with the centuries dividing them) have seen the subject as the effect on the human race.
Both painters are concerned with the awful force of evil. They differ in the way evil presents itself to them in time. Grunwald had not known Belsen nor had he seen Picasso's Guernica. These experiences shaped Sutherland's imagination and gave him insight into the particularly fearful things twentieth century man does to man.
Taking our sins upon Himself the Christ of Sutherland has become the absolute image of today's brutality, today's neglect of spiritual values, today's terrible bitterness. This, says Sutherland's work. is what our special kind of evil has done.
IRIS CONLAY