Year of the Vegetable

In the past year, few artists have had a faster rise to international fame than British Abstractionist Graham Sutherland. His thorny landscapes were a major attraction of last summer's Venice Biennale; he recently had a huge exhibition in Paris, is scheduled for another big show during British coronation festivities, and has been asked to paint a portrait of Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth. Last week Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art put 49 Sutherland pictures on exhibit--the biggest cross section of his work ever shown in the U.S.

As Boston was quick to note, Sutherland is a ferocious artist. Except in such conventional portraits as his full-length painting of Somerset Maugham (TIME, June 13, 1949), he loads his canvas with writhing roots, needle-sharp thorns, blasted trees and immense grasshoppers. There is nothing passively pastoral about Sutherland's nature: his leggy insects and pitiful vegetables are all raw, anguished forms with some of the same kind of supernatural ferocity that Goya got into his bleeding bulls and brutish, Napoleonic troopers.

After the first few days of the show, Boston seemed pretty cool in its reactions. Some gallerygoers complained about Sutherland's deliberately ungainly compositions and harsh colors, wondered "what goes on in the head of a man who's always painting grasshoppers." Said an old lady, back for a second look at his gory Crucifixion: "I dreamt about it last night, and it's haunted me ever since." But for Sutherland fans it was a great moment. Said one student: "It's like meeting a fabulous relative you've always heard about but never met before."

Next stops for the show, after a month in Boston: Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., Akron, Houston, Coral Gables, Fla., Washington, B.C.

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