Here's a little addendum to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts because the current edition of the Church Times has an interesting feature in which Stephen Laird uncovers the artist’s little-known fascination with the writings of Jacques Maritain.
Laird says that Sutherland had a well-thumbed copy of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which influenced his 1936 essay 'A Trend in English Draughtsmanship' and Sutherland's Welsh landscapes of the 1930s, well before Sutherland's later 'religious' work for St Matthews Northampton and Coventry Cathedral:
"Visually, Sutherland's Welsh landscapes from the '30s are most reminiscent of some of William Blake's more haunting imaginative illustrations. Intellectually, they are a fully fledged expression of Maritain's theological programme ...
Sutherland borrows Maritain's words to describe how the artist's part is to create something truly inspired and "poetic", and how this cannot be achieved "ex nihilo", as it must be "gathered from the world of created things" ...
discovering one thing with the help of another, and by their resemblance making the unknown known."
This is of interest as it indicates a degree of influence by Maritain on a generation of British painters and sculptors in the immediate post-war years who were known collectively as ‘the neo-romantics’ (Paul Nash, Henry Moore sometimes, Sutherland, John Piper, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards and others). This movement, as Christopher Frayling has noted, "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope."
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Jonathan Harvey - Speakings.
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