Stanley Spencer / The sacred and the profane

By Alidë Kohlhaas

There is something very modern and yet old-fashioned about the paintings and drawings of Stanley Spencer, an English painter not too well known in this country. Some would use the word eccentric to describe his work. I first encountered this painter's work  many years ago at the Tate Gallery in London. One work that stuck in my mind was his large canvas, The Resurrection, Cookham 1923-7. There were others that attracted me, but perhaps at the time I was too young, too eager for the very latest to really appreciate Spencer's work. His style can be called chunky, and in his early work one can perceive the influence that Gauguin had on him, and his later works may nominally allude to some German Expressionists. Today I look at Spencer with new eyes and find that he has much to offer. No matter what his style may have been influenced by, it is his very own. No one can mistake his works for anyone else's.

This artist's works are now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of its 100th anniversary line-up. Some may perhaps feel that the AGO is bowing too much to its European origins (its very first show 100 years ago featured then modern Scottish painters) by bringing this show here from the Tate. To me it is a fitting show because it leads into another show that opens October 12, Canvas of War. Spencer served as an official war artist during WWII. Though none of his works in the current exhibition are directly of that genre, three pieces lean in that direction: Burners, 1940, Welders, 1941, and Study of iron pieces - wartime shipbuilding c.1940-45. The first two mentioned belong to the Imperial War Museum, London, the latter to the AGO.

Throughout this exhibition it becomes clear that Spencer constantly battled internally with the sacred and the profane. At the same time, one sees that he had an extraordinary sense of home, which might give him a label of regionalism, yet there is something very universal about his work. He was born in Cookham, a small Berkshire town not far from London. He left it to attend the Slade School of Art, where he learned the linear drawing style that informs much of his work. But Cookham always drew him back, even after serving in the First World War, where he saw service in Macedonia. And always it provided a haven when his two marriages broke up.

Spencer was an excellent draftsman. His portrait and nude pencil sketches are always superb, as are those for future paintings.  What struck me, however, is how  uncomfortable his first wife, Hilda, looks.  She is obviously not comfortable being his model. His second wife, Patricia—who had married him only so that she and her female lover could have some financial security—doesn't seem to mind, as the very revealing painting Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife (The Leg of Mutton Nude) shows. These paintings are part of the profane in his life, and while they are of a sexual nature, they completely lack eroticism.

The religious paintings, however, capture the spiritual nature of their content well. Here, in the interpretation of the biblical stories he succeeds even though he has placed events into the environment of Cookham. The Resurrection painting I mentioned above is not in this show. Works like Christ Carrying the Cross [1920], The Crucifixion [1921], and The Betrayal (Second Version) [1922-23] are, however, marvelous examples of the vision he wanted to convey.

This is a very large and detailed show of Spencer's work, and includes various archival materials, such as the postcards he collected of Cookham between 1890 to 1920. As such, it covers every aspect of his life in some form or other. Let me close by mentioning the very charming The Nursery, or Christmas Stockings [1936]. True to the artist's nature, its charm has a bit of a bite. It draws the viewer back to childhood, but it won't allow a drifting into sentimentality.

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