SINCE I remarked upon the almost universal tendency of artists to undergo a slump in reputation after their death, people keep asking me: “Well, why?” The major new retrospective of Graham Sutherland at Dulwich Picture Gallery (to September 25) offers some tentative answers.

Sutherland’s death in 1980 was followed by a huge show at the Tate, originally planned as a tribute on his 80th birthday. Consequently it included a selection of his recent work. The problem with this was that his later work had been widely seen as disappointing, the paintings in particular appearing overblown and mechanical. He may have been a national treasure, but as soon as he was gone, two decades of dissatisfaction were discharged.

After taking a nose dive, Sutherland’s reputation has been reconstructing itself. The Dulwich show sidesteps the late works problem by confining itself to 1924-50. And no one has denied the unique and gloomy intensity of Sutherland’s art in the Thirties and Forties.

His early etchings reflect Samuel Palmer’s idyllic vision of the English scene. But soon he took to spending time in southern Pembrokeshire, and obsessing on the twisted roots and thorns of the region’s submerged valleys. The war made many of Sutherland’s more surreal images of destruction and desolation into bitter reality. Perhaps the climax of his fame came with the huge Coventry Cathedral tapestry, and afterwards he seemed to drift into complacency, dramatically reducing the intensity of his inspiration.

A quarter of a century later we can get Sutherland into a more sensible perspective, accept his faults and warm to his virtues. It all just takes a little time for the wheel to turn.

DOROTHY MEAD, the subject of a reassessment at the Boundary Gallery, NW8 (until July 16), is as exciting a show as I have seen in months. The name was never particularly familiar, even during her short lifetime, 1928-75, and reappeared only in the same gallery’s show devoted to the Borough Group of Bomberg pupils last November.

It was evident from that show that Mead was a considerable talent, so why has she been so neglected? The conventional answer of feminist art history would be that she was a woman, but those who knew her well will readily testify that she was not the kind of woman to be easily put down.

Looking now at her brusquely abstracted landscapes, her boldly individual portraits, her luscious yet curiously geometrical flower-pieces, it seems a real mystery why so few people recognised her quality at the time.

WHATEVER happened to the Ruralists? It was all a great, if belated, hippy experience. In 1975 seven artists set up an artistic community in the West Country, devoted to unspoilt rural pursuits and lifestyle — hence the title Brotherhood of Ruralists, in emulation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood more than a century before. They were Peter Blake, Graham and Annie Ovenden, Graham and Ann Arnold, David Inshaw and Jann Haworth. All were vowed to representation, mostly of a slightly sickly hue: this was, after all, in the twilight of psychedelia.

But some sort of serpent entered their Eden, and between 1981 and 1984 Blake, Hawarth and Inshaw peeled off, leaving the Ovendens and the Arnolds in situ. Where, it emerges from a new show at the Leicester Galleries, SW1 (until July 29), mixing their work with that of the real PRB, they still remain.