Thorns

British Painter Graham Sutherland divides his time and affections between the green downs of Kent and the blue sweep of the Riviera. His paintings have the neatness of one and the brightness of the other. For all that, no one would describe wan, sociable Graham Sutherland's pictures as "nice." He paints twisted roots, withered brambles and bits of sea wrack in a way that makes them look like people in torment.

The emotional impact of Sutherland's cruelly cut and gnarled shapes has already made his pictures the talk of London's avantgarde. Last week U.S. admirers were surveying his work in a handsome new book: Graham Sutherland (Ambassador; $9.50).

The text, by Critic Robert Melville, is almost as obscure as it is ecstatic, but the book gets down to specifics in a plain-talking letter from Sutherland himself. "It is necessary to work parallel with nature--according to our personal temperaments," Sutherland writes. "We are deceived if we work contrary to our inclinations or to nature . . . If I have felt that I must paraphrase what I see, it is because to do so gives me a shock of surprise--a new valuation of things." That might explain why Sutherland begins with careful drawings of what he sees, and ends with forceful and surprising near-abstractions.

Graham Sutherland is that rare phenomenon among modern painters, a first-rate craftsman. He draws with great assurance, turns his hand easily to designing china, tapestries and rugs as well as to strictly "like" portraiture (TIME, June 13, 1949).

At 47, hard at work on a 15-by-11-ft. mural for the 1951 Festival of Britain, Sutherland remains detached enough to wonder whether painting is here to stay. "Cinema and television," he admits, "might provide sufficient visual art to satisfy people's needs. I myself would be perfectly prepared to think in terms of a different medium, and maybe one will have to one day."

But for the present Sutherland has no doubts about going right on painting his same hot, harsh, disturbing pictures. Asked why thorns play such a large part in his painting he coolly replies: "I like the way they pierce the air."

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