Bacon and Sutherland

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) were two of the most compelling and influential of modern British artists. This book is the first to consider their artistic dialogue in depth, offering a rich and subtle analysis of the two artists' work up to 1950. Martin Hammer's starting points are the strong stylistic and thematic affinities between their work and the fascinating series of letters that Bacon wrote to Sutherland (transcribed in an appendix). The book's first section considers the dynamics of the relationship, as well as their intertwined careers. The second explores how their work expressed the experience of living through the Second World War and witnessing revelations concerning the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on the literary production of the period and journals such as Horizon, Hammer reconstructs Bacon and Sutherland's shared immersion in the idea of a tragic art, modelled upon the classical dramas of Aeschylus, and their interest in the possibilities of religious imagery, especially the Crucifixion, as a commentary upon present suffering. How, finally, did the work of Bacon and Sutherland reflect an engagement with international modernism, at a time when much English art was narrowly insular and 'patriotic'? In what ways did their art embody a creative response to Picasso and surrealism, for example, and in Bacon's case to the post-war School of Paris and the emergence of existentialism? This absorbing and ground-breaking book demonstrates why Sutherland was regarded as the most exciting British painter of the day, and how the early work of Bacon, for all its originality, was rooted in the culture of a specific time and place.

ISBN 030010796X   Pages 224 ISBN13 9780300107968 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Yale University Press   Weight (grammes) 1524 Imprint Yale University Press   Published in New Haven Format Hardback   Series title Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Publication date 17 May 2005   Height (mm) 270 Library of Congress ND497.B16   Width (mm) 220 DEWEY 759.209041   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

I		Interactions		5
		Making contact		6
		Affinities		14
		Abroad		32
		The figure question		37
		Milieux		54
		Coda : after 1950		60
II		Devastation		63
		The landscape of meaninglessness		67
		An intense onslaught		77
		Tragedy recurs		98
		On the cross tree now		109
		Types of ambiguity		132
		Continuities		142
III		Influences		149
		Sutherland's roots		152
		The true idea of metamorphosis		185
		News out of France		205
App		Bacon's letters to Sutherland		233

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