Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland was an artist celebrity of the 1950s. He won this status in part by painting a series of works known as ‘standing forms’ which depict semi-abstract figures set against brightly decorative backgrounds. Made at a time when Sutherland and Francis Bacon were closely connected, meeting together and making closely comparable work, the standing forms series epitomises artistic currents of the day: bright colour, painterly mark-making, the rejection of mimetic representation, and the allusion to sinister, existentially troubled dimensions of human experience. Armoured Form demonstrates all of these traits, evoking a suit of armour which flickers in and out of focus, shattering into fragments at its base and casting a shadow that seems to possess a life of its own. The form’s appearance lies somewhere between that of an inanimate defensive structure and a slumbering demigod. Aside from the suit of armour, Sutherland systematically derived these forms from direct observation of nature – a tree branch reflected in a river, an urn, unidentified sculptural forms, and so on. Setting these figures against abstract planes of colour was an innovation prescient of the wider adoption of American colour field painting by British artists in the 1960s. In Armoured Form, geometrically delineated panels of vermilion red and white-blue were built up in thin layers; the strip of paint at the right-hand side of the composition, running from the top of the canvas to the bottom, was perhaps painted wet-on-wet. The colour in Armoured Form shimmers brightly, evocative of Sutherland’s annual visits to the south of France. He and his wife Kathleen made their visit in 1947, on which occasion they met both Pierre Matisse and Pablo Picasso. A combination of Mediterranean climate and new-found inspirations reinvigorated Sutherland’s work, helping him to progress from a British artist of neo-romantic sensibility to an artist with international reach, feted both at home and abroad.