The clown prince of canvas

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Would Stanley Spencer, who died in December 1959, be even half so popular 40 years on had he been contentedly married and quite sane? He was, of course, neither but insatiably infatuated with a lesbian and, if not quite as mad as Lewis Carroll's Hatter, certainly as dotty as his Dormouse.

The question must be asked because, yet again, we are asked to reconsider his work in what is promoted as a major exhibition - part of the poor old Tate's attempt to recover its reputation as a gallery worth visiting - and in even greater measure than is usual in the propaganda efforts to whip in visitors, everyone who ever knew poor Stanley has come forward with a tale to tell, as though knowing what Patricia Preece let him do to her in her gross nakedness, other than entrust it to a wretched canvas now and then, enlightens our understanding of his work.

To assume that Michelangelo was homosexual is to recognise a compelling force in almost all his work, but Stanley's heterosexuality matters not a damn in most of his and is remarkable only in that it led to the ugliest, silliest and saddest pictures that he ever painted.

The Royal Academy gave Spencer a handsome retrospective exhibition in 1980. The advantage of seeing some 300 pictures then was that with so many we could discover some coherence in his development and the references to his own past as well as that of Giotto six centuries before, whether we sought the inspired visionary emerging from the plodding student, witnessed his moving reminiscences of the Great War, shared his simple-minded notions of the Thames as the River Jordan running through the Berkshire Downs and Cookham as the new Jerusalem, or put a price on his pot-boilers of gaudy flowers and ghastlier gardens, the commonplace of art dealers.

The disadvantage of the Tate's new exhibition (greedily expensive, with an admission charge of £8.50) is that at little more than one-third the size of the 1980 show, it utterly fails to give us a rounded picture of the man and concentrates on a few disconnected points, omitting the one thing that would have been useful - a direct comparison between the great Resurrection, Cookham, of 1924-7, and his second, more complicated and diffuse version of the subject, this time set in Glasgow, painted 20 years later and the talking point of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1950.

Never a painterly painter, his work never rich in texture, the paint never enjoyed for its own sensual qualities, Spencer fumbled his way out of the dry handling of paint that is characteristic of Gilman, Gore and other English painters at the beginning of the 20th century and into something even drier. In the first Resurrection it still has a little life and substance, but in the second, as Wyndham Lewis (himself no mean painter) observed, Spencer "is careless of paint. His painting is the negation of quality. It is quantitative. He is endlessly repetitive ... could turn out a thousand figures as easily as a hundred ... the detail ... poor in form ... The colour is drab .... It is English art studentish ... His naivety is painful, like the oppressive archness of a self-conscious little girl."

In such matters as the quality of paint and colour, the slapdash drawing and meaningless distortion of so many figures, the descent into mannerisms that are both the excuse and reason for so much in Spencer's work that is tedious, incomprehensible and unacceptable even as naivety, the curators are not interested - one might even accuse them, in their blind enthusiasm for the man, of not seeing what is there to be seen and seeing what is not - the necessary comparison of the two Resurrections was at all costs to be avoided if their false version of Spencer was to be accepted as the truth.

This is an exhibition at which we, wretched hoi polloi, are not expected to have eyes of our own, nor should we think for ourselves - hideous in a drab unsympathetic green, the largest room divided by a Colditz wall, comparison across it is verboten and we are surprised not to find arrows painted on the floor.

The trend in connoisseurship over the past two decades has been to see Spencer as something of a European painter, aware of the ancestral traditions of the Renaissance, of Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven, of Cubism and the classical Picasso of the Twenties and of the startling German realisms of Schad, Grosz and Dix. We should also see him as very much an English painter of his time, in the context of Paul Nash, Henry Lamb, some members of the Camden Town group and other minor painters - Sickert twinned him with Lamb as a painter of "a certain fateful strangeness" and left him at that. A serious art historian should make a study of the tiny Gowans's Art Books that he collected and carried in his pockets even when he was a soldier on the Macedonian Front with the Gardeners of Salonika (as those forgotten troops were called), for these were the prime source of his knowledge of old masters.

What he knew of Giotto and C?zanne he learned from the lectures of Roger Fry in 1909, for though both to some extent justify his treatment of the human figure, Giotto he did not know at first hand and of C?zanne he can have seen very little other than the pictures in Fry's two Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 (Spencer himself contributed to the latter) which did not include the hideous Bathers now in the National Gallery, the one picture to which one might have risked attributing influence.

If some of us have seen Spencer as the Fra Angelico of Cookham, saintly but much troubled by the delicious sexual temptations offered to St Anthony, we must attribute this to our determination to promote him as an isolated English eccentric of much the same ilk as Sister Wendy Beckett - they have indeed a great deal in common. Spencer had a medieval sense of God's presence even in the privy and was very much a man to take literally the prayer "God be in my head," and if in his head, then between his legs too.

He was attracted by the Hindu notion of sexual union as an act that transcends the Self and translated this into the Christian terms of a sacrament in which spiritual lust was equated with carnal yearning. He went so far as to devise a grand design, a church-cum-harem in which he could paint frescoes for the rest of his life in a state of erotic frenzy, with God unbuttoning his trousers. The plan came to nothing, for no patron could be found to endow such a monastery of the arts of love as practised in Spencer's imagination, two wives at once, both a little lesbian, all three of them ever ecstatic among the potent fetishes of boots and stockings, camisoles and cami-knickers.

This Freudian absurdity makes a second telling comparison if juxtaposed with his work for the Chapel at Burghclere, which was handsomely represented in the Academy's exhibition but at the Tate we must make do with a brief note in the catalogue. How, with such an omission, can the Tate be taken seriously? The futile military campaigns in which Spencer took part, ranging up the River Vardar into southern Serbia and east along the Bulgarian border beyond the valley of the Struma, froze him in winter and cooked him in summer; he was constantly in the presence of death, from both violence and disease, and it was the most serious, influential, prolonged and, in due time, productive of all his experiences.

Reminiscing in 1935, he said of these years: "... when I contemplated the horror of my life and the lives of those with me, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual love, carnal love, bestiality, anything you like to call it. These are the joyful inheritances of mankind."

But before this, between 1927 and 1932, he had had the opportunity to resolve his recollections of the war into the beautiful banalities of barbed wire and mess tins, hunting for lice and laundering underpants, eating and sleeping, and a Resurrection of Soldiers in which the astonishing and very beautiful idea of accumulated crosses has only one precedent in iconography - one that he could not have known - a mysterious devotional picture by Lelio Orsi.

Burghclere exhausted Spencer. Between its completion in 1932 and his death in 1959 his imagination functioned at full measure only twice - the Burners and Welders, painted in 1940 and 1941, his evocation of the heat and pain of shipbuilding for the war effort in Glasgow, and its detritus in The Scrapheap of 1944, a study of rusting iron offcuts piled against a wall, the sort of subject that attracted Ginner in the 1930s when he tackled scenes of industrial decay. Some see genius in the late Crucifixion of 1958, but in truth it is an ugly picture, a lampoon, a mockery, the iconography of Lucas Cranach ingeniously adapted to give primacy to Gestas, the bad, impenitent thief, and two of the executioners, though Spencer muddled his left and right. The combination of Edward Lear, two of Snow White's dwarfs and cartoon violence was a calculated insult to a serious commission.

Spencer was not a man for happy accidents, nor for impulsive changes - he charted his canvases to the half-inch with squared drawings on cheap paper before he touched them with the brush. In a mood of disenchantment it is reasonable to be wearied by his silly and self-conscious innocence, by his whimsy with scale and perspective, by women with the anatomy of eiderdowns stuffed willy-nilly into frocks of fritillary Celanese, their flesh as flaccid as stale sausages, all their husbands clad in tweeds fit only for the bookmaker.

Was Spencer a good painter? Yes, up to and including Burghclere, yes; thereafter, no. Was he mad? Quite certainly, though by the time I met him in 1953 I suspect his madness had become habitual and that he clowned because he thought his audience expected it. Perhaps that is why he painted as he did.

Stanley Spencer at Tate Britain , Millbank, SW1, sponsored by Prudential plc. Daily 10am-5pm. Admission £8.50. Until 24 June.

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