GRAHAM SUTHERLAND AND THE TATE AFFAIR

Graham Sutherland, Douglas Cooper, oil on canvas, 1966

Graham Sutherland—in the 1950s England’s most celebrated painter—and his wife, Kathy, were probably our most frequent visitors. They had rented a villa at Roquebrune, which belonged to the ornithological artist Simon Bussy and his wife, Dorothy (Lytton Strachey’s sister and a renowned translator). They had then moved into the dismal guest quarters of Lord Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina. Later, in 1955, they would buy a small house—a mini-temple to modernism—which the designer Eileen Gray had built for herself in the hills above Menton. Heaven knows why. Graham disliked the modernist look of the house and tried and failed to exorcise it with bits of eighteenth-century grotto furniture. On their way to or from the Riviera, the Sutherlands would usually spend a night or two at Castille. On our trips to the coast we would usually stay with them. For better or worse, we became close friends.

When I first met Douglas, he and the Sutherlands were not speaking. Graham had recently embarked on a successful new career as an Establishment portrait painter. Douglas was derisively skeptical. That British artists were unable to draw was one of his sillier prejudices; hence Douglas’s myth that Graham was such a poor draftsman that his wife had to block in his sitter’s features for him with an eyebrow pencil. True, drawing was not Graham’s forte, but he had a knack for catching a likeness. He was also adept at concealing weaknesses and making the most of strengths: for instance, the way he harnessed his picturesque vision of nature to portraiture. His first and best portrait, the one of Somerset Maugham, stemmed from Graham’s concept of Maugham as being “old as the hills,” his face crevassed with wrinkles. Douglas’s denunciation of the portrait was a measure of his irritation at the success of a painting he had hoped would fail. His Anglophobia decreed that all modern English art be perceived as bad.

As I said earlier, I had been a teenaged admirer of Graham’s. The fact that his father had once been my tutor endeared Graham to me. Why attack one of the very few British painters who were any good, I had asked Douglas in the early days of our relationship. It made him, rather than Graham, look a fool. Why not mend this particular fence? Douglas saw that the fence-mending would be to his advantage; the Sutherlands saw that it would be even more to theirs. Just as well, since what would come to be called “the Tate affair” would make Douglas and Graham deeply—much too deeply—indebted to one another. Each would become the other’s albatross.

The Tate affair, which dragged on for two years of public recriminations and epic farce (October 1952—December 1954) and triggered endless rows in Parliament, endless fulmination in the press, deserves to be remembered because it stands as a landmark in the British Establishment’s painful and long, drawn-out surrender to modernism. Now that Nicholas Serota is transforming the modern foreign section of the Tate Gallery into one of the liveliest and most progressive museums of modern art in the world, it is heartening to look back at the institution’s fuddy-duddiness in the early 1950s and rejoice at the transformation. The issue was supposedly maladministration on the part of the then director, Sir John Rothenstein, but that was more of a pretext. In fact the affair turns out to have been yet another skirmish in a fight that goes back to the opening night of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, the first clash between the vanguard and the old guard. Not that there was anything heroic about the Tate affair. This time round, the principal avant-gardistes were an odd trio: Douglas, Graham, and a devious South African rogue called LeRoux Smith LeRoux, each of whom had a different agenda. The old guard was represented by Rothenstein, the academic son of an academic portraitist, whose taste in contemporary art was parochial and genteel and whose administrative lapses had deservedly come under scrutiny.

The Tate was already steeped in scandal when Rothenstein was appointed director in 1938. The previous director, J. B. Manson (of whom it was said that “he had grown gray in the service of art and purple in its disservice”), had been obliged to resign: at an official luncheon to celebrate the great 1938 exhibition of British art at the Louvre, Manson had drunkenly heckled the speakers and crowed like a Gallic cock. Unfortunately, his deputy, an Evelyn Waughish character called D. C. Fincham, stayed on to perpetuate Manson’s mess and harass his successor. When World War II closed the Tate, Rothenstein decided—most unwisely—to take off for a lecture tour in the United States. Anyone who asked for the new director was told by Fincham that he had fled. To refute these rumors, Rothenstein raced back to London. Whereupon it was Fincham’s turn to vanish—supposedly to work for military intelligence, keeping tabs on fascists in Chelsea pubs. Nobody believed him, and he went the way of Manson.

Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery, London, ca. 1955

At first Rothenstein had difficulty finding qualified curators willing to work for £300 a year. One promising young man decided he could not live on this pittance; another, our friend Humphrey Brooke, found his boss so arrogant and incompetent that in a fit of despair he donned a top hat and went to 10 Downing Street to present the Prime Minister with a formal petition for the director’s removal. And then, on a trip to South Africa in 1950, Rothenstein came upon an apparently perfect candidate, the genial, youngish LeRoux Smith LeRoux, who conned him into making him deputy director. A more treacherous underling would have been hard to find. From the very start, this artful manipulator devoted his energies to betraying his benefactor so that he could step into his shoes. At least this is the story Rothenstein tells in his memoir, Brave Day Hideous Night, which includes 150 pages of exculpatory whining about the Tate affair. Granted, the memoir establishes LeRoux’s villainy; it also establishes the author’s innate silliness and lack of authority in allowing his deputy to spend months in the archives digging up evidence of his boss’s lapses. LeRoux’s sleuthing had the encouragement of Douglas, who had discovered, in the course of cataloguing the great paintings given to the Tate by Samuel Courtauld, that the director had allowed a Renoir from this donation to be deaccessioned (purloined, Douglas said) without the usual procedures being followed. Since Rothenstein’s malfeasance stemmed from sloppiness and not dishonesty, these infractions could easily have been rectified. However, his humbuggery had antagonized the powerful outgoing chairman (a former Lord Chancellor), as well as some of the trustees, notably Sutherland, and much of the staff.

Rothenstein’s failure to do justice to such major twentieth-century art movements as fauvism, cubism, futurism, and surrealism had the small, mutually mistrustful band of British modernists up in arms. Of these, Douglas was by far the most vindictive. Despite the Tate’s refusal to employ him, he had tried to work with Rothenstein. He had lent the gallery paintings from his collection; he had helped him obtain loans for exhibitions and notified him whenever works of museum caliber came on the London market at an affordable price. But the director seldom if ever acted on his tips; and so Douglas passed them on to Alfred Barr of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Barr was thus able to acquire the two greatest twentieth-century landmarks in British hands: Matisse’s magnificent Red Studio from David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club (Douglas bought Tennant’s other masterpiece, Matisse’s Study with Nude, for himself) for around £10,000 and Severini’s futurist tour de force, the Bal Tabarin, from the estate of Richard Wyndham, for £200. (Today the Red Studio would be worth at least $50 million and the Bal Tabarin at least a tenth of that.) Even in wartime, an enterprising director should have been able to save these masterpieces from leaving the country.

In an uncharacteristically generous gesture toward the institution he despised, Douglas agreed to lend most of his Klees to the Tate’s 1945 retrospective. He also helped the gallery obtain major loans from Swiss collections. To my generation, who had seldom seen a Klee in the original, the show had been a revelation. To Douglas it was a revelation of a very different kind: a revelation of the incompetence and bad faith of the gallery’s director. After the show was over, the Tate failed to return his loans despite repeated requests to do so. Mystified and wrathful, he drove Basil’s wasplike Rolls down to the Tate. Rothenstein was nowhere to be found. Eventually a terrified underling confessed that Douglas’s Klees were being held in the director’s office because they were being submitted to the trustees for possible purchase. But they are not for sale, Douglas shrieked. The imputation that he was a dealer was the more offensive since he was ashamed of having been one. “I am empowered to make a citizen’s arrest,” Douglas told me he told the underling. “If my property is not instantly returned, your criminal director is going to jail for theft.”

Douglas got his Klees back. Henceforth he would never miss an opportunity to torment Rothenstein, but the intensity of his malice blinded people to the justice of his cause, so his attacks never prevailed. In the end the Tate Gallery, not Rothenstein, was the loser. “They’ll never get anything out of me,” Douglas was forever reiterating, and he meant it. Even after Rothenstein had retired and been replaced by someone more progressive, Douglas never relented; he simply changed the thrust of his game. Instead of rattling the bars of Rothenstein’s cage, Douglas rattled his will at the Tate trustees. He led them on, helping them organize a magnificent cubist show and letting them have two of his most important paintings on extended loan, but that was all. “Such a good tease, my dear. They think I’ve forgiven them, but they’re never going to get a thing.” The Tate should, of course, have made Douglas a trustee. The Prado, which elected him to its Patronato, was left two of his finest paintings.

While serving as a Tate trustee, Graham Sutherland had come to share Douglas’s concerns about the gallery; he had also fallen under the sway of LeRoux. The three of them agreed that “the Japanese parachutist” (Douglas’s nickname for the small, orientally eyebrowed Rothenstein) had to go. And to this end they formed a cabal. Supporters materialized on all sides, from scholars such as Sir Denis Mahon to critics like Denys Sutton, and members of Parliament and the press. A public-spirited woman friend of ours, who knew Rothenstein to be a Lothario, even offered herself as bait in an attempt to entrap him. Another important ally was Graham’s friend, patron, and sitter, Lord Beaverbrook, who kept the pages of his newspapers, the Daily Express and Evening Standard, filled with the transgressions that LeRoux dredged up in the Tate’s files. However, the more LeRoux dredged, the more Douglas and Graham began to suspect that his motives were not as selfless as theirs. The trustees finally fired him, whereupon Lord Beaverbrook gave him a job. Once again, LeRoux disgraced himself. After swindling this formidable employer out of £40,000, he took to drink and art-dealing, and ended up dying mysteriously after yet another scandal.

Back, however, to winter 1953. On December 21, Douglas triggered the Tate affair by writing a letter to the Times assailing the gallery for having mislaid a Renoir. Despite a seemingly satisfactory explanation by the chairman of the trustees, Douglas managed to keep the fire he had started going—principally by encouraging LeRoux to feed more and more inflammatory material to the Beaverbrook press. Two or three weeks later, the Sutherlands broke their journey for a few days at Castille on their way to Roquebrune. Hours were spent discussing whether or not Graham should resign his Tate trusteeship. Douglas finally persuaded him to do so. There was an implicit quid pro quo. Graham wanted Douglas to devote a monograph to his work. He apparently believed that the stamp of Douglas’s approval would upgrade him from an insular petit-maître to an international star. Eight years later Graham would get his monograph. It failed to validate his work in modernist circles, and did in Douglas’s reputation as a progressive pundit.

At the end of January, Douglas and I joined the Sutherlands on the coast. The time had come to detonate the bomb that would supposedly remove Rothenstein from the Tate. The Roquebrune villa, so redolent of Bloomsbury, became a command post. Douglas was at his happiest helping Graham draft letters of resignation to the Tate’s chairman as well as his fellow trustees. Had Graham been less assiduous in courting the press, his gesture might have been more effective. Unfortunately, before his letters reached London he had confided the news of his resignation to his friend and neighbor (on the Riviera), Lord Beaverbrook. A foolish move. Beaverbrook jumped the gun and published the story in the Evening Standard. The chairman and trustees of the Tate were understandably furious: most of them were every bit as keen to get rid of Rothenstein as Graham was; besides, protocol required that resignations be made to the Prime Minister. Graham was accused of exploiting a delicate situation in order to get his name in the papers. “Now that Graham and Douglas had built up this appalling vendetta in public,” the new chairman, Sir Dennis Proctor, said, “we simply couldn’t have thrown [Rothenstein] to the wolves.” Lady Proctor put it differently: “Graham has kicked the ball through his own goal.”

Calls for Rothenstein’s removal might have met with more success if the gallery staff had not been civil servants (the Civil Service frowns on firing); also if LeRoux had been more trustworthy, and Douglas less childishly keen to rattle the bars of Rothenstein’s cage, “a dank beleaguered flat half underground below the Tate,” which he shared with his nice, long-suffering American wife and, it was rumored, a Jesuit priest who ministered to them.

As usual, Douglas’s mischief came home to roost, leaving its target relatively unscathed. What saved Rothenstein in the end was the venomous letter Douglas wrote to congratulate him on receiving the Order of the Mexican Eagle: “Now that the Mexican president has provided you with the beak and talons of the Mexican eagle you may perhaps feel better equipped to face me in open contest. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that, because your continued disservices to art bring you in Knighthoods and ribbons, I shall…weaken in my attack. There are still more than ten years in which to hound you out of Millbank—and it shall be done.” This letter and the copies that Douglas sent to trustees, members of Parliament, journalists, and other interested parties enabled spokesmen for the Treasury in both Houses of Parliament to claim that Rothenstein was the innocent victim of a spiteful vendetta. As if to confirm the existence of this vendetta, Douglas went ahead and made yet another vainglorious attack on the director—one that left the civil servants at the Treasury more than ever inclined to protect rather than fire him.

The second attack occurred at the opening of Richard Buckle’s sumptuous Diaghilev exhibition—so sumptuous that the Maison Guerlain sprayed the galleries with the celebrated impresario’s favorite cologne, Mitsouko. The evening began with a festive dinner in honor of Lord Harewood and his wife, Marion, who opened the exhibition. After dinner, according to Rothenstein’s memoir, Douglas followed him from room to room, “shouting taunts from a distance in a French accent.” In fact, Douglas and I were talking to the Harewoods in one of the smaller galleries when Rothenstein suddenly materialized. Douglas, who was drunk, cackled, in an accent more camp than French, “That’s the little man who is going to lose his job.” The “little man” could hardly be blamed for flying at him.

The “Tiger of the Tate,” as one of the newspapers described Rothenstein, boasted that his right hook left Douglas crawling around on the floor. Bunkum! All Rothenstein managed to do was knock off his opponent’s glasses. Since Douglas was taller and heavier, he had no problem holding off his attacker, laughing as Rothenstein’s little arms flailed ineffectively. Although the Duc de Mouchy took credit for separating the contestants, it was in fact a subeditor from the Observer who did so. Madame Massigli, the French ambassadress, claimed that she had come upon Douglas, after the incident, all by himself in a room lined with Benois decors, doing “un pas seul et victorieux.” She must have been hallucinating. When a journalist asked if he was hurt, the Humpty-Dumptyish Douglas hooted with delight, “Just look at me, I’m bleeding from every corner.” The presence at this fracas of members of the Royal Family (George and Marion Harewood) had to be kept out of the press; otherwise it was lengthily reported. Both contestants claimed to have behaved heroically. Rothenstein said he had received a letter of congratulation from a painter he greatly admired, Winston Churchill; Douglas told the press that he had received telephone calls from Picasso, and floral tributes from unknown admirers. I don’t know that I believe either of them.

The Tate affair may have sputtered out in farce; thanks, however, to the diplomacy of Sir Dennis Proctor, the conspirators eventually achieved much of what they set out to achieve, except for the expulsion of Rothenstein. In a letter to Stuart Preston, I wrote that “the incident has had the best possible results: Douglas has become a bosom friend of the new Chairman of the Tate trustees, who is appalled at Sir John’s behavior…. Douglas’s new line is to arrange with the Chairman loans and purchase for the Tate over the Director’s head; this is the bitterest blow yet to the Japanese parachutist’s pride. It seems that the little man is ultimately due to go. The Chairman tells us to be patient.” Once again, Rothenstein managed to ride out the storm, but he was stripped of his authority. Under Proctor’s aegis, the gallery shed its fogeyish image and set about acquiring significant examples of twentieth-century art. Having won each other’s hard-to-win trust, Proctor dispatched Douglas to Paris on a buying trip, which resulted in the Tate’s acquisition of two fine Picassos: a major cubist figure painting and a harrowing 1952 still life with a bull’s head.

Graham and Kathleen Sutherland with Winston Churchill at Chartwell, 1954

Graham’s role in the Tate affair should also be seen in the context of the most illustrious and ill-fated commission of his career: a portrait of Winston Churchill, who was then Prime Minister, to be offered to him on the occasion of his eightieth birthday by both houses of Parliament. The portrait was to remain in Churchill’s possession until his death, when it would revert to the House of Commons. The agreement was signed on July 14, 1954, with sittings scheduled to start at the end of August. Since the Tate affair was still rumbling on, Graham hoped that in the course of the sittings he would be able to sway the Prime Minister (at whose discretion the director and trustees serve) against Rothenstein. No such luck. Churchill turned out to like Rothenstein. Graham, who was nothing if not ingratiating, took refuge in deference. So deferential was he that Lady Churchill declared him to be a “wow.”

Graham bombarded us almost daily with pessimistic progress reports. The members of Parliament responsible for the commission had decreed that Churchill be portrayed in his normal parliamentary clothes: black jacket and striped trousers. However, Churchill had set his theatrical heart on being commemorated in the stately robes of a Knight of the Garter, as the savior of Europe, like the conquerors of Napoleon whom Sir Thomas Lawrence had portrayed with such panache for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor. Unfortunately, a grand bravura manner was out of fashion; it was also beyond Graham’s powers. Besides, the electric blue and scarlet of the Garter robes ill accorded with the ominous mustards and purples he had filched from Francis Bacon. And so, Graham told us, he had done a large, flamboyant sketch of Churchill in full Garter fig, which he kept on the easel and used as a screen to conceal the surreptitious sketches he was doing for a less formal portrait. Like it or not, the old bulldog was going to be memorialized as the great commoner, the pugnacious parliamentarian rising from the front bench to crush some adversarial pipsqueak. This concept was intended to neutralize the more philistine MPs; all it did was antagonize the sitter. Churchill was very difficult to paint: in the morning too busy dictating and telephoning and eternally fussing with his cigar; in the afternoon too drowsy and brandy-sodden. It was impossible, Graham said, to conjure a feisty bulldog out of an old soak desperately trying, and inevitably failing, to stay awake.

Douglas and I arrived in England at the end of October 1954, to attend the fateful Diaghilev show described earlier. We were summoned down to the Sutherlands’ house in Kent to see the finished portrait. Graham was understandably in need of reassurance, and Douglas did what he could to provide it, masking his disappointment with fulsome compliments. I took refuge in a dumb show of fake respect to hide my shock at realizing that Graham had based the portrait’s format, pose, sartorial details, and egregious lack of feet on Francis Bacon’s headless, footless Figure in a Landscape (1945) in the Tate Gallery. The fudging of the feet—Francis liked to fudge extremities—was the giveaway. I did not want to draw Douglas’s attention yet again to the increasing influence of Francis on Graham’s work; it would have triggered yet another tedious row. Years later, I did talk to Bacon about it. “Such a petty pilferer,” Francis said. “She never had the nerve for grand larceny.”

Instead of keeping his promise to show Churchill the portrait before the presentation, Graham prevaricated and showed him only a photograph. Churchill predictably loathed it and threatened to cancel the official ceremony. He found the ambivalence of the pose particularly offensive—was he sitting down, or struggling to rise to his nonexistent feet? It made him, he told Graham, look like an old man “who couldn’t sit on the lavatory.” And to others he said, “Here sits an old man on his stool straining and straining.” Graham could only assume that his sitter suffered from some shameful geriatric condition. There was also a political angle. Many of the younger conservatives wanted Churchill to step down as Prime Minister; hence his concern that the portrait should pay tribute to his strengths rather than hint at his weaknesses. In the end the sitter allowed the presentation in Westminster Hall to take place. This was the first and last time the portrait was publicly shown. It met with little but hostility. After the ceremony it was delivered to Chartwell, where it was consigned to the boiler room. One of Churchill’s daughters-in-law told me that Lady Churchill had developed an iconoclastic hatred of Graham’s painting. For all that it was destined to hang in the House of Commons, she cut the canvas up and instructed Ted Hiles, the handyman, to consign the remains to the incinerator—much to her husband’s satisfaction.

Graham Sutherland, Sir Winston Churchill, oil on canvas, 1954 (destroyed)

Francis Bacon, Figure in a Landscape, oil on canvas, 1945

Despite the Churchill debacle, Graham was deluged with commissions. And Douglas, who had once been so dismissive of his portraits, took over as his Svengali. Graham was flattered; I was worried. His ready acceptance of Douglas’s amateurish advice as to a color or a pose or an anecdotal detail seemed to reveal a fundamental lack of faith in his own artistic judgment. Meanwhile, at Douglas’s behest, Graham, like Sargent before him, worked hard to cultivate social connections with a view to lucrative commissions. The Sutherlands’ taste for high life dated back to the beginning of World War II, when they had taken shelter from the bombing in Kenneth Clark’s country house. The Clarks became their exemplars. Graham was too deferential by nature to carry off Sir Kenneth’s air of patrician urbanity with any conviction, however. Kathy’s impersonation of Lady Clark —a dedicated clothes horse who had little to pass on to Kathy beyond some vintage frocks and a taste for champagne that would eventually do in both of them—was an improvement on the original.

The Sutherlands were soon on the friendliest terms with most of the top froth of the Riviera. Douglas was a bit miffed at their success, especially when they took up with the frequently widowed Australian adventuress Lady Kenmare, who had married into his family. The Sutherlands were also thick with the manipulative Daisy Fellowes, who loved to play humiliating tricks on her guests, though you would never realize this from Graham’s bland characterization of her. Another of their new friends was said to have been Goering’s homme d’affaires, Arpad Plesch, a character out of Ian Fleming who collected rare books and erotica and bred racehorses (including two Derby winners) and served up exquisite exotic food cooked inside coconuts grown in his greenhouses. Café society took to the Sutherlands, and vice versa.

Now that Graham’s prices were soaring, Kathy could buy her own Balenciagas. Her haute couture outfits were a matter of great pride to them both, despite Graham’s protests that he would rather she dressed the simple way she used to. “Smart clothes give her such a boost it would be cruel not to indulge her,” he would say. “Do tell her how great she looks.” I would seek out poor Kathy, who would be trying not to seem upstaged by some ultra-smart dress. “Glad you like it, darling. It’s a bitch to wear. All those weights and pads and underskirts.” (She would tug awkwardly at some asymmetrical flange.) “I’d be much comfier in one of my old caftans. But now Graham is so famous he likes me to look posh. I only do it to please him. Yes, I’d love a bit more champagne….”

Who was one to believe? At dinner one night, Lord Beaverbrook lectured Douglas and me about Kathy: “frivolous, vapid, socially ambitious, such values as she ever had contaminated by Café Society.” Douglas agreed. I, on the other hand, felt that insofar as this applied at all, it applied as much to Graham as to her. He was not the only artist I knew to set his wife up as a catalyst for his own shortcomings. Graham’s increasingly slick portraits and modish subject matter—toads that look sequined, eagles that have the meretricious glitter of costume jewelry—were his fault, not hers. No wonder people with a serious interest in modern art turned away from Graham’s work in distaste and hailed his former friend Francis Bacon as the great hope of British painting. As a source of inspiration, low life had a lot more to offer than high fashion.

The final bust-up with the Sutherlands was suitably farcical. Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, had asked Douglas to organize an exhibition, Masterpieces by European Artists, 1900–1950. This was to include fifty-four paintings by the greatest artists of the first half of the twentieth century (ten by Picasso, eight by Matisse, six each by Braque, Gris, and Léger, one each by a number of other artists, including Graham Sutherland). The list came in for some vituperative abuse, notably in the French magazine L’Express, which published an article on September 9, 1974, entitled “Le Choix Insolent de Douglas Cooper,” by Patrick Thévenon. Thévenon felt that Sutherland and many others should have been omitted. Seeing the word “omis” applied to Graham, and not understanding French very well, Kathy concluded that he had been omitted from Douglas’s list. Without bothering to check, she sat down and wrote Douglas a furious letter. As she told a mutual friend, she then read it through, had another drink, and wrote an even more furious version, which she signed “An outraged wife” and mailed. Douglas, who was only too aware that his support of Sutherland did him little credit, was delighted to receive the letter—delighted, as well, that it was Kathy and not he who had trampled the flowers of friendship underfoot. “Lady Proctor was right,” he said. “Trust those silly Sutherlands to kick the ball through their own goal.”