Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Stanley Spencer

Stanley Spencer is an odd fish. The responses to his work are both complex and contradictory — they always have been, and the new exhibition at the Barbican, “Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love,” will prolong the debate. In my own case, one of the most nagging of the many dilemmas his art provokes is this: for someone who could clearly paint so well, why did Spencer often paint so badly? It is not simply a matter of indolence or easy nonchalance on his part: there is nothing slipshod about his bad paintings, indeed in places they are rendered with fanatical, pedantic diligence, but for me the great problem at the centre of his achievement remains this schism, this schizophrenia of technique. It is rather as if a chess grandmaster voluntarily switched to draughts, or Chopin confined himself to ragtime.

When you look closely at, for example, the extraordinary deftness and skill with which Spencer has painted the shadow of Patricia Preece’s lace negligée as it falls on her thigh (in the remarkable Patricia Preece, 1936), or the way, in the great self-portrait of 1959, the cropped grey fringe falls over the seamed brow, you wonder how the same man could have produced the simplicities and inept distortions of Villagers and Saints or The Lovers. It is like setting a Lucian Freud beside a Beryl Cook. In the end such a wilful abdication of talent — if there is no obvious reason: sloth, drink, drugs, penury or mental collapse — remains baffling.

Perhaps this sort of deliberate shift — from the refined to the unrefined, from the subtle to the crude — occurs when innocence is over-venerated, and in Spencer’s case this notion may be particularly apt. Broadly speaking, what we value in the native or the primitive — the pleasure prompted, say, by a Grandma Moses or an African carving — is the delight we take in seeing aspects of our world depicted in a manner un-mediated by sophistication, by familiar cultural reference, by centuries of tradition and so on: all the rules and regulations, expectations and assumptions of a mature art form. I suppose that motives of this sort may inspire the highly accomplished artist to attempt to reproduce these effects, to scour away the gunge and clutter of too much skill and civilization, too much thought and reflection. By fashioning a false innocence we may borrow some of the properties of the real thing: fool’s gold has duped many a gnarled prospector.

Certainly Spencer in his early work followed the example of the quattrocento with genuine success, but no pictures in this exhibition date from before 1933, and their naivety, their distortions and simplifications have moved on from emulation or the influence of classical traditions. Spencer’s faux-naïf style is from this time onwards sui generis—it stands or falls on its own.

And its putative success would have been far easier to establish or defend if it were not counterposed — and undermined — by examples of a technical skill and artistry unshakeable in its self-assurance and triumphant in its exceptional ability. For example, Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece is one of the great disturbing portraits of the twentieth century. Initially, it is the arrant candour of the image that unsettles and disquiets. The almost palpable weight of the large, pendulous, blue-veined breasts, the folds and creases of slack flesh, all the flaws and discrepancies of a particular body that give an individual her, or his, physical quiddity. Then almost unconsciously you grow aware of the variety of skin tone — the chicken-fat yellows, the tarnished greens and licheny blues, the raw pinks and dirty browns, the blurry roses and clotted creams. Patricia Preece’s body seems extraordinarily lit, as if by some sublime cinematographer, until you realize that this is in fact what we are actually like, that human skin, closely observed, looks like this, that this improbable assemblage of pigments on a canvas is the product of an artist’s eye scrutinizing what he sees in front of him. Steadily, other aspects of the portrait emerge: the unusual intensity of Patricia Preece’s big-eyed stare, the troubling ambiguity of her expression — a tension? or a superb confidence? Then, inevitably, ideas of artist and model intrude on the reverie of portrait and spectator. This model is the artist’s wife. Even if you knew nothing of Spencer’s fraught relationship with Preece you would concede the astonishing intimacy of the portrait, acknowledge what it offers up and exposes to the viewer’s gaze, what emotions and potential history are implicit in it. The unequivocal power of this and other portraits set the standards by which the rest of Spencer’s work is to be judged, and, as with all great artists, the criteria are established by the artist himself.

The physical layout of the exhibition is constructed roughly along lines that Spencer envisaged. It was an idea that originated in the early 1930s after the completion of the Burghclere chapel (and was probably inspired by it). Spencer conceived of a notion of displaying his work which he referred to as the Church-House project, or a “church of me” as he sometimes described it, a collection of pictures that would represent a conspectus of his unique imagination, in both its sacred and secular dimensions. The architecture of this building was vague but was approximately churchy in configuration — a long nave, with side chapels, a transept, an altar and altarpiece. He made rough sketches of this scheme over the years and it is fair to say that almost anything he painted after its conception had its place somewhere in the rambling aggregate of buildings, small rooms, alcoves and corridors that the Church-House design had now become. He was, to put it another way, painting to equip and fit out his own private gallery which, when completed, would be a summation of his life’s vision. Clearly, it was always going to be impossible to reproduce this ambitious plan in its entirety, but the Barbican has made a good stab at it, first by assembling a large and significant proportion of those pictures, and second by physically recreating something of the church effect. In the “nave” of the gallery pictures are grouped under generic titles, set in alcoves, and on either side are a couple of “rooms,” or “chapels,” one containing the magnificent portraits of his formidable second wife Patricia Preece, the other for the “Christ in the Wilderness” series, the small square paintings set high up on the wall, like a frieze. A large and bizarre crucifixion (of 1959), a kind of horrific cartoon, acts as the altarpiece, and to the left the gallery continues, as one arm of an extended transept into rooms containing the Port Glasgow Resurrection, and the Hilda Chapel, a homage to Spencer’s long-suffering first wife, containing the enormous, unfinished Apotheosis of Hilda.

It was worth the effort: the arrangement conveys a vivid sense of Spencer’s idiosyncratic personality and obsessions, and you gain some sense — however stylistically distinct the work is — of its unifying factor, that joyous celebration of life’s diversity. The Patricia Chapel is the most effective. There is an almost visceral shock experienced as you walk in, with four of the big pictures hung virtually frame to frame: the two double portraits and two nudes, and, to each side, two portraits. The viewer stands there, faced with this vision of flesh, pinned in a crossfire of Patricia Preece’s unflinching stares, nervously privy to Spencer’s candid exultation in his wife’s — and his own — nakedness.

But here lies the problem. To move from the profound and disturbing power of the Patricia Chapel back to the “nave” of the gallery is to experience a marked diminution of effect, a diminution brought about by a number of factors that we will come to see are typically Spencerian. To put the contrast very simply, you move from refulgent, life-sized, superbly painted portraits to large long rectangles of canvas crowded with small figures. The juxtaposition is disquieting. But this shape of canvas crowded with its clustering figures was highly popular with Spencer. It embodies what might be termed the predella effect. A predella is part of an altar-piece, a horizontal strip, or separate painting below the main painting, often used, so my Pevsner informs me, “for a number of representations in a row.” Its effect was deliberately designed to be subsidiary. The votary would approach the altar, overwhelmed and awestruck by the vast crucifixion, or transfiguration, or whatever, above it, then kneel, and then his eye would be caught by the predella. The same emotions are experienced in this exhibition on emerging from the Patricia Chapel — nothing matches the power or impact of its pictures. And many of Spencer’s most famous paintings are predella-like, not just in format but in design, containing large “numbers of representations in a row.” The Port Glasgow Resurrection, the “Last Day” sequence, the “Christ’s Passion” sequence, and so on, all reflect this strong linear component. The eye need not necessarily travel from left to right as if reading a text, but it does (in pictures of this sort and shape this is the eye’s natural tendency — it has to be cajoled into roving). Furthermore, if you look closely at, for example, a panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection, The Reunion of Families, 1945, in purely painterly terms, ignoring its religious import and not attempting to assess its particular meaning, then the first quality that strikes you is the mutedness of the palette. The colours are uniformly sombre and subdued: beige, stone, moss green, grey, dull cinnamons and umbers. There is nothing rich here, nothing vibrant or glowing. At first I thought this might be a side effect of the very unsatisfactory lighting in the gallery or of the curious colouring of the walls the pictures are mounted on — a pale puce — but in fact this dullness is a feature of many of the large paintings on display. Unusually, reproductions of Spencer’s pictures tend to flatter the originals. His colours are predominantly dusty, flat, depthless — even the famous Desire from the “Beatitudes of Love” series shines on the page in a way it does not on the canvas. It is not hard to see why this should be so. In The Reunion of Families (or any number of other examples) the paint is applied very thinly, so thinly that the warp and woof of the canvas is rarely obscured by the pigment. There is absolutely no sense of any joy or satisfaction in the plastic tactile sensation that comes from the application of paint to canvas from loaded brush, no exploration of the fundamental possibilities of oil. Oil paint is used in these cases simply for its basic colour properties, and even then within this oddly reduced, dull range. The paint seems heavily thinned with turpentine, often leaving the squaring-up, pencilled grid clearly visible behind the near-transparent smear of colour. Of course, in these large pictures Spencer reproduces an overwhelming effect of texture, but this is more a result of his love of pattern and minute detail, which is depicted with assiduous and mind-boggling patience. In the great olive drab swathe that is Love on the Moor every brick in the wall which runs along the top of the picture is dutifully painted in, as is every dogtooth and stripe, herringbone and polka dot, dart and flick on the clothes of the picture’s swarming population.

Staring at square yards of these paintings two comparisons came to mind as I tried to register and evaluate their effect. First of all they seemed to possess the properties of tapestries, rather than paintings. The absence of depth of field is the clearest similarity, and the flatness of the visual plane and the diminished or non-existent perspective are very tapestry-like. So too is what might be termed the picture’s dogged egalitarianism. The very top right hand corner of Christ Delivered to the People—a branch of a tree, a wall, a neutral section of street — is rendered with precisely the same care and attention, sharpness of focus and concentration on detail as is Christ’s face! This is the democratic deadening effect of tapestry, one stitch enjoying exactly the same status as another, but is not normally a consequence of painting, except in one genre of it — which brings me to the second comparison — namely hyperreal-ism. One is hugely impressed, full of admiration, before these large Spencer pictures, almost stunned by these vast testimonials to his prodigious diligence and tirelessness, in much the same way as one is amazed how this or that airbrush-wielding hyperrealist has captured every gleam and warped reflection, every twinkle and dent, in the chrome innards of a Harley Davidson. Look at the Waking Up panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection. Each leaf is there, every blade of grass, every petal on the primroses (yet the babies have the individuality of lumps of dough, strangely). But this sedulous industry — like hyperrealism — is in the end a facile talent, indicative more of a certain hyper-patient cast of mind than of genuine artistry or genius. And nowhere is this better illustrated than in the huge unfinished canvas (twenty feet by six feet) The Apotheosis of Hilda.

Perhaps “barely started” would be a more apt description than “unfinished,” as only the top left hand corner is actually painted, approximately one twelfth of the canvas. The rest is ready for painting, and in a way that is highly revealing of Spencer’s methods. In fact the expanse of white canvas is more like a sheet from a giant sketch pad: most of the rest of the composition has been drawn on the surface in pencil, but drawn in the most elaborate detail — even the fishnet mesh of Hilda’s gloves has been cross-hatched in. And what has actually been completed — and this is not meant to sound flippant — forcibly reminds one of an abandoned “paint-by-numbers” exercise. Looking at the painted twelfth of the picture, it is immediately obvious that the completed work would have been the Apotheosis of Detail also. Spencer has painted virtually every pebble on the ground, every brick in a wall. Here and there the white circle of an untreated face waits for later attention. The effect of so much effort is disorientating: clearly on paintings of this scale this kind of method, or something similar, has to be employed simply to get proportions right and composition exact, but it has to be said that there is something soullessly mechanical about this laboured depiction of minutiae: leaf by leaf, pattern by pattern, stitch by stitch it goes, a monstrous pseudo-Gobelin, the triumph of pertinacity over afflatus.

What is in the end so exasperating (and I think that one word sums up the complexity of response this exhibition stimulates in me) is that counter-examples abound, and not just in the rapt carnality of the Patricia Chapel. There is a portrait of Hilda Spencer—Seated Nude—which is equally fine. As with the Patrica Preece portraits, it exhibits a sensitivity to the potential and resources of oil paint far superior to anything in the large allegories or religious paintings, not just in the freedom with which the paint is applied, or reproduction of subtle skin tones, but also an awareness of how impasto and wash, highlight and shadow, of overt brushmark set beside absolute smoothness can simulate the contours of the body and properties of skin with spectacular success. The effect of the bulge of muscle over bone on Hilda’s right shoulder is achieved by thick strokes of pale coral set just below the smooth cream highlights where the skin is stretched over the deltoid. The axillary folds above her breast are painted slate grey, almost scumbled, with the white weave of the canvas allowed to show through as highlights. Over and above this technical mastery the wholly uncompromising honesty of the painter’s eye is again very powerful. It is the antithesis of idealization, but derives its power precisely from that ruthlessness. The flesh tones of the face are markedly darker than the hues of the torso, suiting the slight frown on Hilda’s brow and the odd, troubled, askance nature of her gaze. One needs no specialized biographical information to recognize this as a great picture; all its ingredients fuse superbly. As they do in the portraits of the Patricia Chapel and as they do, for example, in the three marvellous self-portraits of 1914, 1936 and 1959.

By emphasizing the achievements of these portraits over the religious and allegorical paintings I do not wish to denigrate work that we might normally and unreflectingly regard as quintessential Stanley Spencer. But the division exists, and the artistry and spirit that infuse the former seem only marginally present in the latter. Furthermore the allegories and religious paintings are heavily encoded, replete with possible interpretations. Some of them have a more public dimension — great religious themes — others remain irreducibly private. From this stem further ambiguities and problems of response. Standing before a picture that is manifestly the product of a personality at once so eccentric and idiosyncratic can be unsatisfying: one’s own emotional and intellectual comprehension seems inadequate or nugatory. What is one to make of The Chest of Drawers, for example? A large woman looms over a small man rummaging in the bottom drawer of a chest. Superficially it seems to me badly painted — textureless, hurried, faux naïf—and as for its content I suppose it might pass muster as a private joke or whimsical jeu d’esprit. However, set in the full context of Spencer’s life, buttressed and explicated by what we know of his personal history and his private needs and desires, from information gleaned from his letters and journals, the painting takes on a different significance and is judged by altogether different standards. But this is to make the picture an adjunct to autobiography — as a work of art it still seems to me deficient. By this I don’t want to imply that great or good art must necessarily have an accessible public dimension — I am not insisting that the cryptic and the obscure exclude themselves from evaluation by their very nature. On the contrary, the truly private import of, say, the Leg of Mutton Nude will probably remain for ever buried. But the picture exists for us in a way that, for example, The Lovers or A Village in Heaven don’t. If we are denied — or are uncertain of — the significance of the images in a picture then the only way we can respond to it is either through some purely private correspondence — a fortuitous subjective recognition — or else by traditional methods of evaluation. This is the case with many of Spencer’s pictures, and they suffer thereby. The same disadvantage besets the religious paintings. Suffused as they are with Spencer’s highly individual sacramental vision, the odds on chiming with it naturally and spontaneously are small. Hence the almost inevitable accusations of whimsy (the British disease) or facetiousness. No such occlusion conditions our response to the portraits.

Not everyone would agree with Frank Auerbach’s conviction that the only lasting and valid test of an artist’s worth is how he or she treats the posed human figure. Mind you, they might not agree because it is such an exacting yardstick, before which many a lesser or vainglorious talent has its inadequacies brutally exposed. However, in a slightly wider context the assertion does have a real bearing on Spencer and his corpus of work. The great problem for artists of narrative, allegorical, ideological or symbolic subjects is that, more often than not, it is the story, the allegory, the politics, or the symbol itself, which fascinate, far more than the medium through which they are rendered. Form, as the cliché has it, is sacrificed to content. Hence the enduring presence of those great eternals in an artist’s repertoire — the posed figure, the nude, the self-portrait, the interior, the still life, the landscape. Because the nature of the subject is so timeless, the balance between form and content remains in equilibrium. And it takes a real, not to say great, artist to raise the subject from the humdrum to the sublime.

The very nature of the religious and allegorical sequences, the faux naïf Beatitudes, and the domestic scenes place them in a different category. Here are the products of a highly personalized and maverick imagination, in the line of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. It is their very strangeness, their self-contained and self-assured idiosyncrasy that either enchants — or not at all. But in the astonishing portraits and double portraits of himself and his wives and a handful of other pictures Spencer reveals himself as an artist of major and enduring stature. All great art is unsentimental, and this is art of an honesty that is transcendent and magisterial in its formal accomplishments.

1991