Stanley Spencer: under an english heaven

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Aimee Brown Price

Fiercely independent, British painter Stanley Spencer developed an esthetic at odds with European modernism. A current retrospective showcases works ranging from studies of labor and war to personal expose to scenes from his hometown of Cookham-on-Thames.

Prodigious from early on, touted when he was an art student and already the recipient of important awards, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was confident of his gifts, a helpful trait in the world of art, where the unusual or original may be trounced by people of little vision but large voices or, worse, ignored. Spencer's wonder at the world and its marvelousness, often the driving spirit of his imagery, whether in his religious paintings, portraiture, landscapes or his so-called imaginary pictures, did not stop when it came to himself. What might have been insufferable braggadocio and shameless conceit in others was redeemed by an endearingly guileless acceptance of what he had to offer.

Although Spencer is one of the most interesting British painters of this century-long acknowledged in his homeland with exhibitions an important mural commission, knighthood, biographies, a play(1) -- his work is not widely known on these shores.(2) "Stanley Spencer, An English Vision" is now making the rounds with a representative sampling of his works, including several scarcely known canvases from private collections. The exhibition should go far toward remedying this situation. It excludes his wonderful drawings, however, and, of necessity, his fabulous mural complex.

The exhibition brings up the recurrent question of how much a viewer needs to know about an artist's biography to fully appreciate the work. This is a central question for Spencer because the dramatis personae of his own life figure repeatedly and insistently in his perfervid imagination and imagery. It holds true for even as direct a painting as Spencer's meticulous Self-Portrait done in 1914 at age 23, which shows how he viewed himself as a young man: straight-on, seriously peering at himself as if to extract his essence; and larger than life, as he was to himself, though physically he was a small man. The previous year, barely in his 20s, he had already been recognized by Henry Tonks, the notoriously difficult head of the famous Slade School of Art in which Spencer was enrolled, as showing signs of "having the most original mind of anyone we have had at the Slade [combined] ... with great powers of draughtsmanship." The compliment was not reciprocated; Spencer was already well on the way to having his own vision and for his part, he discounted his training as "barnacles on this me that makes this journey."

As Dedham was to Constable a century earlier, or Shoreham to another compatriot, Samuel Palmer, so Cookham was to Spencer -- his locus amoenus, his place of delectation, delight and love. Cookham-on-Thames was where he was born the seventh son into a garrulous family of ten surviving children, steeped in the Bible by his father (a music teacher and organist), and home taught. Cookham was his nurturing cocoon, and he knew the village and surrounding countryside intimately. It gave him a sense of place, of self, of reassurance and of destiny, and was to figure importantly in his work. Spencer continued to five there even as he commuted for four years to the Slade (part of University College, London), where the scholarship-boy was dubbed "Cookham" by his fellow students. To him the village was not a confining place; to the contrary, everything happened there. And after his forced exile during the First World War, initially as a hospital orderly in Britain and later in Salonica, Greece, in the ambulance division and infantry, Spencer returned home. As one of a large number of war artists commissioned (in 1918) to document their experiences, Spencer had by 1919 already produced a "strange," as he put it, large (72-by-86 inch) canvas of convoys laden with casualties, Travoys with Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September, 1916 (Imperial War Museum, London), that recalled his earlier experiences. The war was to figure more importantly in much later works.

The exhibition title "Stanley Spencer, An English Vision" explains the artist's imagery by way of a distinctive sensibility bred by country and nation. The curators attribute the national character they posit for Spencer's art to particularity and love of place -- we would add his special attachment to his village. An "English vision" also implies a certain insularity, a segregation from the mainstream, and the singularity and independence that come with it. These last give way to notions of eccentricity and idiosyncracy, qualities which do and do not pertain to Spencer's work.

The excellent catalogue is peppered with statements from the voluble and eminently quotable Spencer, whose verbal expressions are just as unusual as his visual way of putting things. Though Spencer's peculiar combination of traits is easy to get wrong, exaggerate or not take seriously, the beautifully written catalogue has perfect pitch and conveys the canniness of the man, who was well-read, headstrong, intractable and charming. Fiona McCarthy's adroit essay displays a rare combination of fairness and finesse in describing a most unusual and unwieldy subject, balancing excellent art history and mastery of the materials. She emphasizes the unfairness of ascribing Spencer's extraordinary originality to "eccentricity," a characterization which undercuts his training as well as his concentrated strength of thought and feeling.