Stanley Spencer: piously eccentric artist with near fatal infatuation

Carrick Hill hosts a number of English artists’ works, and Stanley Spencer’s are among the most noteable.

Christ in Cookham (1951-1952). From Stanley Spencer: a twentieth century British Master, Carrick Hill.

Bill and Ursula Haywood, who built the handsome residence Carrick Hill and eventually bequeathed it to the state of South Australia, were great collectors of modern English artists, from Henry Lamb to Jacob Epstein, although their Australian pictures are also worthy of note. There are works by Arthur Streeton, for example, and a beautiful little oil sketch of Thea Proctor by George Lambert.

The most important of the modern English painters they collected was Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) — at one point they owned 14 of his works — so it is fitting that the 30th anniversary of Carrick Hill as a home-museum should be celebrated with an exhibition of Spencer’s work. It is not a comprehensive survey and does not include important works from British collections, but it does represent the range of pictures held in Australia and New Zealand, and it is extensive enough to give the viewer an idea of the artist’s range and characteristic themes.

In fact there is also, displayed on the staircase and the study outside the exhibition space itself, a selection of pictures by Stanley’s younger brother Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979). He was also a talented young man who did well at the Slade School in London; his paintings have some affinities with his brother’s, both because of their common training and their relationship, but he has neither the sharpness of perception nor the visionary eccentricity of Stanley.

The brothers were the youngest of 11 children born to an organist and music teacher and his wife in the little village of Cookham in Berkshire. They grew up in a close and cultivated environment without a lot of money and seem to have been largely educated at home before going off to art school.

Stanley Spencer remained viscerally attached to Cookham, which appears in many if not most of his works, and he ended his life there, wheeling his painting kit around on a pram and in the end working on the huge unfinished canvas Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta almost until the day he died.

Spencer began to make a name for himself before World War I, but then spent several years in the army, first as a medical orderly and then as an infantryman. The experience marked him profoundly, and it gave a new inflection to the religious themes that had been present in his work from the beginning.

A decade after the war he was commissioned to paint the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere (1927-32), covering the lateral walls with images of soldiers going about their daily routines behind the lines, and filling the central one with a vast scene of dead soldiers rising from their graves and returning the anonymous white crosses which had marked their burials to the central figure of Christ.

In 1925 he married Hilda Carline, then a student at the Slade, the daughter of an artist with two brothers, Richard and Sydney, who were also painters. Hilda and Stanley had two daughters, who are still alive though very elderly, and who are interviewed in a documentary shown in a sitting room downstairs. It is particularly interesting hearing them speak about the events that soon destroyed their family life, and which began with their father’s fatal infatuation with the lesbian Patricia Preece.

Preece and her companion Dorothy came to live in Cookham, and although she was hardly a great beauty, Spencer became fascinated by her sophistication and was increasingly sexually obsessed. Eventually he left his wife, they were divorced and he married Patricia, who somehow contrived to have him make over the title of his house to her. The marriage was never consummated, however, and from then on Spencer’s life was a misery, torn between sexual frustration, guilt and nostalgic longing for Hilda, who refused to have him back.

On the face of it, it is the story of a rapacious and unprincipled gold-digger taking advantage of a naive and almost unbelievably incompetent artist. At a deeper level, it is hard not to suspect Spencer somehow got himself into a situation that was half farcical and half tragic in futile pursuit of a dream of union between physical desire and mystical aspiration.

From a distance, Spencer’s situation becomes unwittingly emblematic of British attitudes to sexuality in the last century: desire was overwhelming, obsessive and destructive, but never joyful. Sex was shameful and dirty; at best, some relief was found leering at the swollen breasts of page three girls or tittering at the double entendres of endless television comedies. Married life, especially after a couple of children, seemed to settle into the pathetic standoff of lustful husbands and frigid wives so often rehearsed in the films and TV of the time.

However unconsciously, Spencer made himself the living allegory of this morbid sexual paralysis in his relationship with Patricia, never more appallingly evoked than in the so-called Leg of Mutton Nude(1937), painted just before his second marriage, in which he squats naked behind the equally naked and outstretched figure of Patricia (London, Tate Gallery). In works such as this we can see how strongly Spencer anticipates the joyless nudes of Lucian Freud in a later generation.

It is typical of what we can consider the British attitude to sex — although it has of course much in common with contemporary Australia — that Patricia is never idealised in these pictures. Lust is completely divorced from the admiration for beauty: features are sullen and unappealing, breasts are toneless and sagging, the pelvic girdle is an anatomical study in underlying bone structure, like those medieval memento mori pictures in which we are reminded that a pretty girl is really just a skeleton underneath. Lust is not pleasure; it is twinned with disgust, and ultimately the experience of a yawning existential void.

More generally, this attitude to the body is that of the northern realist tradition that we also see most clearly in such artists as Gruenwald, although it is discernible even in individuals such as Duerer who have attempted to assimilate the classical spirit through their encounter with the Italian Renaissance. It is the fundamentally Christian view of the body as compromised by sin, doomed to mortality, and radically incapable of the ideal beauty first imagined by the Greeks.

That spirit is already present in one of the earliest works in the Carrick Hill exhibition, an extraordinary pencil self-portrait in which the artist makes no attempt to show himself off to the best advantage, but is only concerned with seizing the likeness of a figure scrutinising itself: not surprisingly, the eye is the most telling part of the drawing.

Most of the works in the exhibition fall into one of two groups, so different in style that anyone who did not know Spencer’s work might hesitate to attribute them to the same hand. One of these is the category of landscape and still-life subjects mainly painted to make money, since the artist had a new and demanding wife as well as his former family to support.

Spencer took no pleasure in painting these pictures, which he did not consider part of his real oeuvre, yet there is nothing careless about them. Quite the opposite: if they are not painted with love, they are certainly painted obsessively, and we can see why they sold readily — they were an updated version of the pre-raphaelite vision which is so quintessentially English in its love of nature and flowers, things so much easier to love, and without the aftertaste of shame, than human bodies.

The other category of pictures deals with religious themes. Spencer was intensely religious in his own eccentric, or more exactly mystical, way, and his first important exhibited painting, John Donne arriving in Heaven (1911), prefigures his later work in the use of simplified, blocky figures and the setting of other-worldly visions in the everyday landscape that he knew.

The blocky, naive figures are, as is clear from the extreme articulacy of other pictures, a deliberate choice, and one may wonder both why he adopts them and where they come from. As far as the latter question is concerned, it is clear he was deeply impressed by Giotto, who had been celebrated by Ruskin and was discovered by a broader public in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Arena Chapel had also been a model for the structure of the Sandham Chapel. But where Giotto had been concerned to give his figures a new solidity and volume, Spencer turns his version of them into disembodied forms like the drawings of children.

The reason for this stylistic choice is no doubt that he is seeking to represent a spiritual reality: the bulkiness conveys a certain monumental quality, while the disembodied, hollow feel tells us that these are visions or dreams; above all they are antithetical to the obstinate, intractably fleshly reality of Patricia’s body.

His themes include, here, Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, naturally imagined as taking place in the village of Cookham, as with so many of his other religious subjects. In another room is a series, borrowed from the Art Gallery of Western Australia, of Christ in the wilderness, one of which illustrates Matthew 8:20 — “the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head”. In another, Christ overturns the ­tables of the moneylenders.

Resurrection was a theme that appealed to Spencer throughout his life, perhaps because of the thought that the risen body will be free of the stain of sin and able at last to commune with others in joy. It was the subject of the chapel already mentioned, and also of The Resurrection, Cookham (1926-27, London, Tate).

In the present exhibition one of the most important compositions shows departed grandparents rising from the grave in Cook­ham churchyard, watched by young people who seem to have returned from swimming in the Thames.

The most touching picture in the exhibition, however, is one that Ursula Hayward persuaded the Art Gallery of South Australia to acquire. Hilda welcomed was painted in 1953, several years after Hilda’s death (1950), but it imagines her as risen from the grave and young again. The artist’s daughters, by then adults, are also shown as children, clinging to their mother, and there are two other adult women, who may represent Patricia and her partner Dorothy.

In the centre of the composition but largely masked by the figure of Hilda, the artist represents himself embracing his former wife, reconciled at last. Spencer imagines an alternative, perhaps future, spiritual dimension in which conflict, anger, frustration and pain are forgotten, and where love, tenderness and harmony are at last possible.

Stanley Spencer: a twentieth century British Master

Carrick Hill, Adelaide. Until December 4