Graham Sutherland's appointment by the War Artists' Advisory Committee in June 1940 to record the devastation of the London Blitz marked a subtle change in his art. The outbreak of war had found him, in a state of great mental bewilderment . In his early, uncommissioned works made at the urgings of his friend Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, Sutherland freely explored his own emotional response to the war. As the treat of the German War Machine deepened during 1939 an intense air of foreboding manifested itself in Sutherland's paintings. Black Landscape (1939-40, Tate Gallery), for example, has a deep sense of volcanic unrest about it, as if the Welsh hills it depicts are about to spit forth fire.

In his commissioned works, Graham Sutherland's emphasis turns from a personal reaction to a more objective, official representation of the destruction. He told how he was: suddenly a paid official - a sort of reporter - and naturally not only did I feel that I had to give value for money, but to contrive somehow to reflect in an immediate way the subjects set me. The London Blitz lasted from September 1940 until mid-1941, killing over 20,000 people and injuring many more. Graham Sutherland was firstly asked to record firstly the wrecked buildings in the city and was subsequently sent to the badly-bombed Docklands and residential areas in the East End.

Describing how he saw and recorded the bomb damage as he walked the streets, Sutherland explained:

I would start to make perfunctory drawings here and there; gradually, it was borne in on me amid all this destruction how singularly one shape would impinge on one another. A lift shaft, for instance, the only thing left from what had obviously been a very tall building


In this preliminary work, the abstract, collage of fragments echoes the chaotic, bomb-damaged streets. Disparate shapes crowd in on one another and disrupt any sense of pictorial space whilst the strong, lurid purple background becomes symbolic of the literal discordance of war.

The layered textures of the war pictures, strongly visible in Bomb Damage, quite possibly owed something to Graham Sutherland's years training as an etcher and also to his limited use of materials. He travelled into London from his home in Kent with nothing more than a sketchbook, two or three coloured chalks, and a pencil. The size and the paper on which this piece is executed would suggest that the basic composition of the picture was completed 'in the field', in chalk and pencil; with the watercolour washes presumably added at a later date.

In common with his other commissioned works, Bomb Damage does not present us with any human figures. The Committee expressly forbade Graham Sutherland from depicting people amongst the ruins and instead, the ruined constructions themselves take on a bedraggled, organic form. When describing his foray into some of the ruined factories in the City, Graham Sutherland notes particularly the destroyed machines, their entrails hanging through the floors, but looking extraordinarily beautiful all the same.

Graham Sutherland's pictures made in residential areas, notably Devastation: 1941: An East End Street (1941, Tate Gallery), radiate a greater air of tragedy. Graham Sutherland was greatly disturbed by what he saw there, describing several incidents to friends in which a mattress, blown from a house, or the meat from a bombed butcher's shop, appeared for a moment to be human corpses.