“A screaming comes across the sky” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Caramel, burnt oak, cinder brick. A white scratching that complicates the black and watery night. This might be cloud or coal dust. Particulates of debris. Smoke. Bits of crumbled wall are spread out, disorganized and hectic. The flat plane of an elevation, the cake-slice of a cross-section. In its destruction, the city spews forth disorder and arrangement. But there’s not a body to be seen.
Between 1940 and 1945, British painter Graham Sutherland found himself employed full-time as a salaried artist of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC). Over the ensuing years of the war, he would document bomb damage and human immiseration across now militarized landscapes as diverse France, rural Wales and the interior of London’s fire-gouged East End. The paintings of this series (charred abstractions, precise yet formless) came to form a single body of work. It was titled Devastation.
The abstraction of Sutherland’s architectural imagination was in part necessary. Precise locations were withheld, and human remains obscured. This was, after all, propaganda. His studies and drawings, in pen, charcoal and oil, express themselves in both accuracy and disarray. Clear, crisp elevations, executed with the accuracy of an architectural draftsman. Neat cross-sections, precise details. And then a scratchy, blasted smear of bleak black and toxic yellow. This place of death, Sutherland remarks, was once a place of ordinary order.
Throughout, certain features reoccur. Like the fallen lift shaft seen in The City a Fallen Lift Shaft of 1941, a work whose compound sentence, not slowing with colon or rest, seems to address the very same compaction of earth, brick, tissue and iron that he was seeing before him, in these dismal London streets. And always by night. Technology is a compressive force, both clarifying and erupting. Either way, it is a cause of disorder.
Graham Sutherland, Devastation, 1941: an East End street
Between these stints in London, Sutherland would find himself painting the tin mines of Cornwall, the limestone quarries of Derbeyshire and the deep coal prospects of Swansea and South Wales. To the end of March 1944, he painted five sprawling scenes at the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich Arsenal, commissioned by the WAAC.
War is pitiful. It is violent and incoherent. But despite being a “war” artist, Sutherland’s architectural imagination seems—to me—always more concerned with human, technological interfaces, with the vast “story” of modern technologies. Mine pits as well as bomb craters. Collapsed rubble and quarried stone. These, we might imagine, are extensions of the same kinetic process of modernity; a sequence of destructive interactions across the surface of the human world. War is misery. But technology is also misery.
Graham Sutherland, Studies for 'Devastation: East End Street'
Sickly yellow light. In the scene of Devastation, 1941: An East End Street, we do not witness fire, spewing combustion. The scene is suffused with a pallorous, anemic mustard. Suggestive of a glow, the play of torches and smouldering. We have arrived after the event, into a place of haunting. Sutherland positions himself at an intersection, facing the point at which the horizon vanishes. Geometrically, the world is cardinally oriented. It obeys certain rules, just as it does not obey them. The force which brought these streets into existence (mining, transport, heat, gravity, science) also undid them. It is all very spidery and precise, yet vanishes into a bleak and billowing beyond.
Stillness, melancholy. The street has been punched into the folds of Hades.
But why this style? Smeared oil, fine thin black line work. Heavy, dry brushes fill the space behind lattices of exacting and diagrammatic accuracy. It might be a kind of reminder that when “war” arrives into a space, it does so almost randomly. The architectural rigour of his drafts find uneasy contrast with blurrily washed-out and sticky areas of decay and disorder. The target of the bomb was not this house, but the accreted, amassed abstraction of the city as a totality. One building may be reduced to smouldering ruins, while its neighbour stands are sure as it ever was. Technology, and the infrastructure of modern murder, is not - we find - a thing of accuracy, even if it is born from it. Rather, it’s a thing whose existence is dependent on the interplay of the exact and the inexact; the elegant and the dismal. War turns everything into a diagram - of a building’s blueprint and a body’s ruptured anatomy.
Graham Sutherland, (also titled) Devastation, 1941: an East End Street
I think back blearily to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel whose first big lump is set within the war-crazed, ale-drowned and chaotically erotic environs of London during the Blitz. The protagonist, Slothrop, begins the peculiar work of mapping his sexual exploits against a map of V2 rocket detonations across the surface of the city. While the distribution is “random”, each site - each crater and death - coincides exactly with the location of his trysts. War is random. But it knows what it is doing, tethered to the erectile ideologies of a truly morbid modernity. War flows out of the trench and runs, in slippery channels, to science labs and psychologist’s couches. It “penetrates” (sorry, too on-the-nose) the environs of everything that is not war, or seems not to participate in it.
Modernity, we might come to realize, is trying to fucking kill us.
Graham Sutherland, Studies for ‘Devastation: Burnt out offices’ (probably 1941)
Whichever way you look at it, Sutherland was attempting to evoke a continuity of devastation - to extract the singular moment and location of terror and to abstract it across the surface of his era. “Devastation” was a collective title for this series, because this devastation participated in a singular, unbroken act of misery and malaise. These are apocalyptic images, his studies evoking that same trembling between order and decay. Smeared with mustard and pollen and burnt umber and scratchy black, these spaces - disembowelled buildings, depicted simultaneously as architectural and destructed insectoid drawings - come across as deeply melancholy, instances of private unknowable horror and a generic, abstracted energy which squats over it like a dark and bilious spider.
After painting the jaundiced, window-like scene of “A burnt-out interior in the city,” Sutherland remarked: “I will never forget those extraordinary first encounters [with the ruins]: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and then a thin tinkle of falling glass - a noise which reminded me of the music of Debussy.”
The city had been disembowelled, and its music was disjointedly modern. And this modernity—in its ability to embody both order and chaos—was something which can be coralled and directed, but never understood. In the gored ruins of London’s East End, an indecipherable and ancient mystery slinks into the darkness and the smoke.