Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion (1946, Church of St Matthew, Northampton) is one of the most discussed British paintings of the 20th century and a defining work of postwar sacred art. Commissioned by Walter Hussey, the vicar of St Matthew's who had already successfully commissioned Henry Moore's Madonna and Child for the church, Sutherland's work announced that the Church of England was prepared to commission modern artists for its buildings - a decision that proved both artistically important and culturally controversial.
Sutherland had spent years during the war as an official war artist, documenting the destruction of industrial sites and civilian infrastructure in Wales and London. He had seen what industrial violence does to the human form - the twisted steel, the smashed buildings, the bodies reduced to wreckage. When he came to paint the Crucifixion, he brought this visual vocabulary with him. His Christ is not the graceful, serene figure of the Italian and Spanish traditions. He is angular, taut, physically destroyed - a body that has been worked on by violence, not merely posed in it.
Contemporary viewers in 1946 brought to this image the specific visual memories of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, whose images had been published in British newspapers throughout the spring of 1945. The emaciated bodies of Belsen and Dachau were present in the culture's recent visual memory, and Sutherland's Christ - his body gaunt and angular, his ribs visible, his posture that of a body that has been reduced - resonated with those images in a way that polished academic crucifixions could not. The Passion was not safely historical. It had just happened again.
Sutherland's theological sources were explicit. He had studied Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece closely - that earlier response to plague and suffering that placed a diseased Christ on the cross as comfort and solidarity with the sick. He understood that the history of the most powerful Crucifixions was a history of artists responding to specific contemporary sufferings by finding in the Passion of Christ a figure adequate to those sufferings. Isaiah 53:5 - 'He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed' - is the underlying theological logic: the suffering of Christ corresponds to the suffering of the world, and in that correspondence healing is possible.
The painting remains in the Church of St Matthew alongside Moore's Madonna, Piper's stained glass window, and other modern commissions that Hussey assembled. The church functions as a kind of manifesto for the partnership of modern art and Christian faith in postwar Britain, and Sutherland's Crucifixion is its most challenging and most important work - a painting that refuses to make the death of Christ bearable by making it beautiful.