MARY FEDDEN & JULIAN TREVELYAN
Bohun, Henley-on-Thames

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago there were three artists who held the Order of Merit: Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and, the youngest of all, Graham Sutherland. The OM is widely regarded, among artists and literary folk especially, as the honour most worth having: not only the rarest, but betokening lofty and genuine regard for what you have done rather than who you are.

At that point Sutherland was undeniably top of the heap. So why is the centenary of his birth, which falls this year, being celebrated in such a niggardly fashion? So much so that its only substantial marking in London is the retrospective which occupies the loan-show slot in the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia, and consequently is around for a mere six days. This is not to denigrate the shows Angus Stewart curates annually at the Spring Fair: last year’s did wonders for the reputation of another neglected artist, Keith Vaughan. But it still comes as a shock to be bracketing Sutherland with Vaughan as a “neglected artist”. How did this disastrous decline come about?

The first answer is that he died at the wrong time. At his death in 1982, at the age of 79, preparations were well advanced for a major retrospective at the Tate. It became his memorial show and was given surprisingly short shrift by most critics — though not by me.

You could see why. It was undeniable that Sutherland had been rather resting on his laurels in his final years: in his last few exhibitions at Marlborough Fine Art it was the habit to show the big oils along with the small watercolour sketches, and the diminution of intensity and perhaps sheer energy between sketch and final version was all too evident.

And then he had become a fashionable portraitist, most famed perhaps for the notorious image of Churchill that Lady Churchill apparently burnt in the garden. (The Olympia show includes a variant portrait, hidden in a private collection for 20 years, which makes Churchill look much livelier and less uncomfortable and is surely superior to the destroyed painting.)

However, it remained questionable where the agony had gone. For Sutherland in his younger days was noted for his agony, expressed in a preoccupation with thorns and twisted roots and a villainously effective range of burning and acid colours.

John Piper, who was working in North Pembrokeshire in the 1930s while Sutherland was working in the South, once told me: “I don’t know where Graham found all those twisted roots. I never saw anything like that in Pembrokeshire.” He paused for a moment, and then added: “But of course, the artist sees only what he is already looking for.” Precisely. When Sutherland was lean and hungry he really felt the more uncomfortable side of life, and took a rather gloomy view of things. He was suffering, as artists were supposed to suffer.

Later he became less hungry, though not much less lean, and started moving in higher strata of society. Though the thorns are still around, with justification from Christian iconography, in another of his most famous works, the Coventry Cathedral tapestry (represented at Olympia by a group of very dramatic studies), and many of his portraits are decidedly prickly. But some of the original fire in his gut seems to have been extinguished. Nevertheless, a slightly disappointing end does not invalidate a breathtaking beginning. We do not think the less of Walton’s First Symphony because we feel a severe falling-off of creative energy in his Second. So why should we feel any differently about Sutherland, whose career offers a surprising number of parallels with Walton’s?

If, in some ideal world, you could carry off your choice from the Olympia exhibition, it would admittedly be one of the unforgettable prewar landscapes, or one of Sutherland’s stunning official war artist studies of the devastated home front, plus probably one of the very early, visionary etchings from the period when he first discovered Samuel Palmer. But some of the late studies of insects and other beasts are also compelling. And anyway, even in Francis Bacon the agony became latterly more gesture than true feeling. Up to the 1970s Sutherland and Bacon were regarded as very much on the same level of achievement. At Olympia you can see ample evidence that we badly exaggerate the distinction between them today.

Curiously, Mary Fedden’s trajectory has been almost exactly the reverse of Sutherland’s. Born in 1915 (the same year as Terry Frost), she lived for a long time slightly in the shadow of her husband, Julian Trevelyan, and tended to be regarded, rather patronisingly, as a charming but minor purveyor of cute images. Typical images in her work — cats and flowers on window-sills, quaint pots, speckled birds’ eggs and playing cards — do have their cute side. But even those most susceptible to re-use as greetings cards are underpinned by a rigorous sense of composition and a highly refined gift of bringing a variety of glowing fauve colours into collision so that the result is bracing rather than sating.

The show at the Bohun Gallery confronts a group of very recent work by Fedden with mostly lateish works by Trevelyan, several painted in the last two or three years of his life. The juxtaposition shows the similarities and dissimilarities. Trevelyan tends to take the broader view, looking at expansive landscapes, often in exotic foreign parts, while Fedden generally prefers to stick closer to home and the domestic scene. Trevelyan’s style is bolder, and sometimes coarser, with touches of conscious naivety, while Fedden never pretends to be simpler, or less neat, than she naturally is.

I doubt if we would ever think to bracket them, if we did not know that they were married. Fifteen years after Trevelyan’s death, Fedden has really come into her own and is painting as strongly and surely as ever. Just what a senior RA should be, in fact: in touch with tradition, but never afraid to push the envelope when the occasion demands it.

• Graham Sutherland, Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Olympia, W14 (020-7370 8211), until Sunday. Mary Fedden & Julian Trevelyan, Bohun Gallery, 15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon (01491 576228), until March 18