Artist in Focus: Graham Sutherland,
National Museum Cardiff, 2011

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Archiving the Artist: The Graham Sutherland Collection at Amgueddfa Cymru

This AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) funded a collaboration between the University of Bristol and Amgueddfa Cymru, to catalogue and research the museum's Graham Sutherland archive. The studentship was awarded to Rachel Flynn, and supervised by Grace Brockington and Elizabeth Prettejohn at Bristol, and by Nicholas Thornton and Oliver Fairclough at Amgueddfa Cymru. Flynn's thesis was completed in 2013 and has had a number of benefits, both for the student and for the museum.

Contents

Training

Dissemination

Career development

Further Collaborations

Training

Flynn's training at Amgueddfa Cymru included:

• Sorting and re-storing the archive. This included working with conservation staff to develop better storage and display for the archive, ensuring better access for researchers and the future preservation of the objects.
• Cataloguing objects onto a new, specially-developed ACCESS database. This searchable resource records details of nearly 1,500 objects and has significantly improved access to the archive.
• Curating exhibitions based on her research
• Giving public talks
• Responding to enquiries from the public and from other scholars about the Sutherland archive and collection
• Supervising undergraduate interns from the University of Bristol who gained valuable experience of working in a national museum

Dissemination

Throughout the project, Flynn’s work was widely disseminated through exhibitions, gallery talks, and publications in art magazines and exhibition catalogues. Her research has been made publicly available on the Museum’s website.

The project coincided with a wider revival of interest in Sutherland which saw attempts to reassess his work in a variety of contexts. This led to a number of visits from scholars and the public to see the collection and archive at Amgueddfa Cymru. Many of these were facilitated by Flynn, contributing to at least three publications and three exhibitions at other public galleries and museums.

Exhibitions

Flynn curated two exhibitions during the CDA: Artist in Focus: Graham Sutherland (National Museum, Cardiff, 11 June – 30 October 2011); and Graham Sutherland (Oriel y Parc, St Davids, 31 March-30 June 2012). She delivered public tours and gallery talks during these shows which were very well received in both venues; feedback from visitors suggests that combining the display of art and archival objects generated new insights into Sutherland’s life and work.

Flynn also helped make the collection and archive available to the curators of the exhibition Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 2011).

Publications

‘Biography’ for Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World, ed. George Shaw (Modern Art Oxford, 2011)

‘Graham Sutherland’, catalogue entry for A Companion Guide to the Welsh National Museum of Art, ed. Oliver Fairclough (2011)

‘Graham Sutherland's Unfinished World: Q+A with George Shaw’, Art in America (December 2011)

‘I do not seek Picasso, I find…: Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain’, Tate Etc (Issue 24, Spring 2012)

Public talks and exhibition tours

2012: ‘Graham Sutherland: An English Cosmopolitan’, The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 27 May

2012: Exhibition Tour: Graham Sutherland, Oriel y Parc, 31 March

2012: Exhibition Tour: Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World, Modern Art Oxford, 3 March

2012:‘I find: Sutherland and Picasso’, for panel discussion on ‘Picasso and Modern British Artists’, Late at Tate Britain, 2 March

2011: ‘Graham Sutherland: People, Places and Papers’, exhibition tour for Artist in Focus: Graham Sutherland, National Museum Cardiff, 15 July

2011: ‘ “The exultant strangeness of this place”: Graham Sutherland's Welsh Writings’, Arnolfini, Bristol, 14 July

2010: ‘Archiving the Artist’, lunchtime talk at National Museum Cardiff, 5 February

Career development

In June 2012, Flynn was appointed Assistant Curator of Historic Art at Amgueddfa Cymru (one year contract), four months before submitting her PhD thesis. She is currently Exhibitions and Collections Co-ordinator at Dimbola Museums and Galleries, Isle of Wight.

Further collaborations

The project has facilitated further collaborations between Amgueddfa Cymru and the University of Bristol, such as an MA curatorial unit entitled Revolutionary Dreams: Investigating French Art, which explored developments in French realism in the nineteenth century in the context of social and political unrest, the changing pursuits of leisure, and the role of women in society. A group of twelve MA students researched and curated an exhibition drawing on the museum’s world-class collection of French art. They wrote essays for online publication on subjects ranging from 'Personalities in Painting' (PDF, 633kB) (Matthew Howles) to 'The Landscapes of Millet' (PDF, 806kB) (Jessica Hoare), and 'The Paintings of Charles Bargue' (PDF, 642kB) (Rhian Addison). Visitor responses to the website have described the essays as:

'Beautifully written. I live in France, but on my next visit to the UK I will certainly make the effort to visit this exhibition. Having read the essays (Landscape Fakes in particular), I will study them with a fresh perspective.'