Published: 24 November, 2011
by HOWARD HANNAH

IT was a golden time at the Slade School in the aftermath of the Second World War – an embarrassment of talent. Students of the time included many whose education had been interrupted by war service or national service.

And among those was Keith Sutton who was 24 by the time he started his course, having served in the Royal Navy.

His immediate contemporaries included Victor Willing and Michael Andrews, and later Paula Rego.

Rego, who works prolifically out of a busy Kentish Town studio and is now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, remembers Sutton both as a painter and a good friend.

She says Sutton followed a different artistic route to those of his contemporaries at the Slade, and devoted some of his energies to writing art criticism for publications such as the New Statesman and the Listener.

“He wasn’t really interested in what we were interested in – the abstract work that we were doing,” Paula Rego told me. “But as time went on he spent more time on his art and he just got better and better. He was a sensitive and subtle painter.”

And now she has played a part in what promises to be a revival of Sutton’s overlooked art at the Millinery Works Gallery in Canonbury next week, where his paintings will be for sale.

Of particular interest will be his later, abstract works so admired by Rego, which have never been shown.

Sutton became a great friend of Victor Willing at the Slade and then of Paula Rego whom Willing married.

He went to stay with the couple in Portugal in 1960 after they married.

An exhibition of his work at the Galerie de Seine in 1958 had been well received by the critics and this was to be a time when his life as an artist took off.

He went to stay in Paris with the American artists Paul Jenkins and Alice Baber and fell in love with their friend, the young artist Thomas Erma.

1962 saw another successful exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London where his collages in particular came in for critical acclaim.

But the sudden and unexplained of death of Erma of gunshot wounds in Paris in 1964 at the age of just 24 was the first in what was to become a series of set-backs in Sutton’s life.

In 1967 his world was disrupted when the building of the Swiss Cottage library and swimming pool forced him out of his home in Winchester Road.

He found a new flat in Belsize Avenue, but then had to devote time to his parents’ ill health.

In the first years of the 1980s after his parents’ death, he resumed his work with great enthusiasm, but in 1983 he faced a new battle over his housing and was eventually evicted by his landlord after a lengthy court procedure. He found a new, but much-reduced home in Primrose Hill.

Throughout, he had the moral support of Rego and Willing and their three children who lived nearby.

But after the death of Victor Willing in 1988, his spirit seemed broken. “He used to come round to our house every week,” recalls daughter Vicky Willing. “But he took the death of my father very badly.”

Sutton died at University College Hospital in July 1991, leaving all of his paintings to Willing’s three children.

Since then, says Vicky, his work has been in store when it really should be on walls being seen. His friend the scientist John Mills enthuses: “This exhibition is a chance to see his entire oeuvre, from his early naturalistic work, which is very good to the assured and rather stark collages and then to his motif paintings in acrylic which have never been shown before.”

• Keith Sutton – A Retrospective runs from November 29-December 22 at The Millinery Works Gallery, 87 Southgate Road, Islington N1 3JS, Tuesday -Saturday 11am-6pm, Sunday 12-5pm, 020 7359 2019, full catalogue online at www.millineryworks.co.uk