New Statesman: War artists

Bacon and Sutherland

Martin Hammer

Yale University Press, 272pp, [pounds sterling]25

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During the Second World War, Graham Sutherland became a widely acclaimed artist, supported by Kenneth Clark and sought after by collectors. Francis Bacon, by contrast, was still unknown outside his immediate circle and restlessly destroyed most of the pictures he produced. But the great merit of Martin Hammer's fascinating book lies in the author's ability to make us understand why these two men managed, at least for a while, to forge a close friendship.

Hammer's book displays much evidence of wide reading and hard looking. All the letters written by Bacon to Sutherland are reproduced in an appendix, and they show just how dissatisfied the artist felt about his early work. "I am sick to death of everything I've ever done in the past," he wrote to Sutherland from a Monte Carlo hotel in 1946, "but continue to think like a child or a fool that I'm on the edge of doing a good painting."

These men were brought together by the struggle against Hitler's abominations. Bacon wrote his earliest extant letter to Sutherland in 1943, telling him "how much I like some of your paintings in the National Gallery". The show in question concentrated on recent work by the official war artists. Until this point, Sutherland's success as a landscape painter had far outshone Bacon's painfully protracted struggle to define his ambitions as a figure painter.

That Bacon exhibited nothing between 1937 and spring 1945, when his first nightmarish triptych was displayed at the Lefevre Gallery, must have made Hammer's task extremely difficult. Yet the author succeeds in establishing links between the two artists, both on a technical level and in terms of their mutual search for "a metamorphic art encapsulating the pathos of wartime life".

He points to their shared fascination with Marius Maxwell's photographs of animals in equatorial Africa, and suggests that the new boldness of colour in Sutherland's 1944 work might have been given impetus by Bacon. He, in turn, was helped by Sutherland to reacquire his sense of artistic identity. Hammer is especially searching in his discussion of Sutherland's Crucifixion altarpiece, and how it may have been affected by Bacon's great 1946 painting of a crucified meat carcass slung behind a man grinning under an umbrella. He also shows how Sutherland introduced Bacon to influential collectors, and how the two artists developed an obsession with gambling in Riviera casinos.

Only in the 1950s did their relationship become unbalanced, by which point Bacon was pursuing a powerfully single-minded course, while Sutherland was becoming increasingly erratic. By the mid-1960s they had stopped seeing each other altogether. Yet Hammer, who has also curated the new exhibition of Sutherland's art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, is right to claim that they played a shaping part in the development of each other's work during the war, and that this was instrumental in the making of both Bacon and Sutherland as artists.

Four paperbacks of Richard Cork's writings on modern artists, including Bacon, are published by Yale