Artwork of the Month

Graham Sutherland was employed as official War Artists in 1940, working in London he studied the buildings destroyed in the bombings, especially in the East End of London. 

The artist Clare Woods has selected this work from The Hepworth Wakefield's collection to be shown as part of her current exhibition, The Unquiet Head. Clare responded to Sutherlands's use of the fallen lift shaft as a means to embody his response to war.

Sutherland remarked in a letter to art critic Edwin Mullens:
 
'I would start to make perfunctory drawings here and there; gradually it was borne on me amid all this destruction how singularly one shape would impinge on the another.   A lift shaft, for instance, the only thing left from what had been obviously been a very tall building; in the way it had fallen it was like a wounded animal. It wasn’t that these forms looked like animals, but their movement were like animal movements.  One shaft in particular, with a very strong lateral fall, suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix.'