A Poet of Sexual Gloom
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)
was the major British painter of the period between the two World Wars and one
of the key British painters of the century, but his work is barely known in the
United States. Few of his paintings have made their way into American permanent
collections--I counted only two in the extensive exhibition now on view at the
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Spencer's work--figurative, regional,
allegorical, religious, and just plain weird--fits uneasily into the
isms of 20 th -century art. To an American eye, Spencer's
paintings at first glance resemble those of Thomas Hart Benton (born two years
before Spencer) in their often monumental and mural-like style, but they are
richer, kinkier, and more idiosyncratic than anything Benton did.
Suddenly,
unexpectedly, the time is right for Stanley Spencer. Within the space of a year
came the successful New York run (last winter) of Pam Gems' intense
biographical play Stanley , the American publication of Kenneth Pople's
comprehensive biography, and an admiring profile by Simon Schama in The New
Yorker . The recent attention showered on Spencer's flesh-obsessed
successors, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (a movie about the latter is due out
this winter), makes Spencer seem more mainstream.
It is Spencer's small-town Englishness, more remote and
more visually unfamiliar than Degas' Paris or Picasso's Spain, that makes him
difficult to grasp. Born in Cookham, some 30 miles west of London on the River
Thames, Spencer had such an idyllic childhood that he spent the rest of his
life re-imagining it in paint and seeking (often with disastrous results) to
restore it. "I wish all my life I could have been tied to my mother's apron
strings," he confided. His mother bore 11 children, whom his father tried to
support by giving piano lessons and playing the church organ.
Spencer's artistic talent was
recognized early, and he joined an extraordinary generation of students at the
Slade School of Art in London. A photograph of a Slade summer outing, circa
1912, shows Spencer surrounded by such gifted contemporaries as Dora Carrington
and Mark Gertler (whose erotic snafus were chronicled in the recent film
Carrington ), as well as by the painter David Bomberg and the poet Isaac
Rosenberg. Recognized by the Bloomsbury set, Spencer's early work--heavily
influenced by Gauguin's neoprimitive paintings of Christs and angels in Breton
costumes--was included in one of the critic Roger Fry's influential group
exhibitions, which introduced British audiences to Cézanne and Picasso.
Spencer's magnificent self-portrait of 1914, dark and mysterious as a
Rembrandt, was snatched up by an important London collector.
But
Spencer's instincts remained insular and domestic. The better known he became,
the more he burrowed into Cookham backyards and bedrooms. The Centurion's
Servant of 1914 evokes the attic of the house where Spencer grew up. It is
based on a story of Jesus healing a sick man from afar; Spencer placed himself
in the role of the convalescent--still recumbent but already striding from the
sheets--and his brothers and sister as praying supplicants. The bed itself,
with its red, patterned skirt and luminous china knobs, dominates the picture.
"Mentally," Spencer later observed, "I have been bedridden all my life."
World War I interrupted this cozy idyll. The undersized
Spencer, just 5 feet 2 inches, signed up for the army medical corps. Like Walt
Whitman, he found deep satisfaction in nursing soldiers shipped back to
England: It was "wonderful," he said, "to dress nearly every wound in the
ward." Later he served in the same capacity on the Macedonian front and then,
as Britain relaxed its standards in its need for cannon fodder, in an infantry
battalion.
Unlike so many of his
shell-shocked generation, Spencer had a good war, even--as Fiona McCarthy
writes in her catalog essay--a "cozy war." He made a triumphant return to
painting, completing the dreamlike Swan Upping at Cookham (1915-1919).
Ostensibly concerned with the yearly ritual of tagging the swans along the
Thames, the painting is really a sort of Leda and the Swan in reverse.
The artist, Spencer once claimed, commits "a kind of spiritual rape on every
thing." This time it's the men who carry off the swans--or hold them in bondage
in a boat--while awaiting the mattresslike bedding that two women dutifully
convey. The erotic edge of this stylized composition is confirmed in a little
scene on the iron bridge above, where two lovers look yearningly at each
other.
Some of
that same hallucinatory involvement with animals found its way into Spencer's
Travoys With Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol,
Macedonia (1919). Though Spencer's famous mural sequence at the Sandham War
Chapel near Cookham, bristling with resurrected soldiers, is often considered
his masterpiece, Travoys is more moving in its simple and devastating
design. Four "travoys" converge on a brightly lit window. The mules peek
curiously at the surgical operation in progress, one of the strange and
inexplicable rituals of humans at war.
Spencer came late to sexual maturity, and he tried, after
his marriage to the painter Hilda Carline in 1925, to make up for lost time. "A
man raises a woman's dress with the same passionate admiration and love for the
woman as the priest raises the host to the altar," he wrote. But as Hilda cared
for their two daughters and for a sick relative, Stanley looked elsewhere for
those sacred apron strings. He fell in love with another Slade-trained painter
called Patricia Preece, whose "high heels and straight walk" gave Stanley, as
he cruelly confided to Hilda, "a sexual itch." Preece lured him into marriage,
then refused to consummate it, making clear that she expected to live instead
with her female lover. Stanley spent his wedding night forlornly with Hilda and
many years afterward longing for a reconciliation. Their eldest daughter,
ironically named Unity (Stanley and Hilda were divorced on her seventh
birthday), stares accusingly out of the wonderful portrait Hilda, Unity and
Dolls (1937). Unity's piercingly innocent gray eyes contrast with the
nightmarish black holes that substitute for the dolls'.
Like many another would-be
prophet of sexual glamour (D.H. Lawrence comes to mind), Spencer ended up as a
poet of sexual gloom, especially in the two pitiless double portraits of naked
Stanley and naked Patricia painted in 1936 and 1937. A raw leg of mutton in the
foreground of one of the paintings matches the couple's tired flesh while a
stove burns brightly--Stanley's repressed desire, perhaps--in the
background.
A relief to turn from these
pictures, which seem to prefigure our own sexually anxious age, to such comical
dreams of resurrection as Spencer's exuberant The Dustman (1934), in
which the Cookham garbage man has returned from the dead and is cradled like a
baby in his wife's arms, while neighborhood children offer gifts of empty cans
and other trash. In The
Dustman , wrote Spencer, "I try to express
something of this wish and need I feel for things to be restored. That is the
feeling that makes the children take out the broken tea pot and empty jam
tin."
