Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

The Artist: Between Sex and Religion
Part Two

Stanley Spencer lived just long enough to be knighted. Or perhaps the British Empire decided to recognize the original and remarkable artist only by 1959. Queen Elizabeth II, then early in her long reign, belatedly bestowed the title upon him and just in time. Very shortly thereafter, the artist died of cancer. Like many of his fellow war artists and colleagues, Spencer was educated at Slade School of Art, part of that remarkable class, educated by Henry Tooks, that went off the war and came back with paintings. While his colleagues at Slade were colorful and free thinking Bohemians, steeped in all things au courant, Stanley Spencer was eccentric in the way that the English excel at. He was very small, never taller than five foot two inches, short and diminutive for an adult man, looking very young in the old fashioned bowl hair cut he wore all his life. Spencer arrived at Slade with his original vision or version of the world completely formed and totally intact, and all of this unique view derived from his home town, Cookham on the Thames. Cookham is a Berkshire site so perfectly English that it seems to have been imagined by a film production crew tasked with digitizing a perfect British village. Miss Marple could have lived here, solving murders. Spencer’s classmates at Slade called him “Cookham,” probably due to his insistence on commuting, arriving in London at eight and departing at five, always returning home, even for late afternoon tea.

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Cookham High Street (1925)

Spencer’s family was artistic, musicians, who were involved with the Church of England, providing a religious outlook for the young boy. His father taught music, not because he was a simple small town professor interested in playing the organ, but because he apparently had a passion for teaching and playing the versatile instrument. The remarkable head of the Spencer family constructed his children from a Victorian perspective, stressing useful skills such as conversation and social dancing. The interests of the family was by no means confined to the picturesque village, for Stanley himself was named after a famous Stanley Spencer, who had flown a blimp, an “airship,” complete with advertising for the Mellin Food Company. The first Stanley Spencer had flown this gasoline powered winged contraption in 1902 from its launching point, the Crystal Palace, thirty miles across the English countryside. Spencer’s feat was a commercial success and a flying success. This blimp, the “Mellin Airship,” with a wooden propellor, was a follow up to the German design by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1898. Given the early twentieth century in all things futuristic, it is no surprise about the determination of the painter’s father to organize a collection of great literature for the library as if to balance his son’s namesake, the symbol of the promise of tomorrow. As Kenneth Pople, stated,  

“Statements about the Spencers being lower-middle-class apple-cheeked country folk should be resisted. The family may have possessed a village practicality and, in Stanley’s case, an often earthy sense of humour. But intellectually, ‘Pa’ had a metropolitan outlook – his music training and early teaching was done in London – and Stanley’s destiny lay in an enlightened if at times straitened household which went on to produce a knight, two professors, a concert violinist, a professional stage conjurer celebrated in his day, the Director of the National Building Institute in London, an Oxford graduate cut down in the Great War, and the wife of a Cambridge don.”

Unlike his classmates at Slade, Spencer was self-contained and self-sufficient in that he was disinterested in contemporary styles and in current art trends. While Nevinson and Wadsworth followed Cubism and Futurism into Vorticism, while Mark Gertler sought his own definitive take on modern art, Spencer looked backward to the Early Italian Renaissance for themes and inspiration and even for style. For him, the way in which these early painters interpreted the world, assuming that God was present everywhere and that Jesus walked among them, was a natural extension of his religious upbringing. In updating their medieval art, Spencer looked closer to home. Indeed, if he had any near precursors, they would have been the Pre-Raphaelites, in their penchant for fantasy, their taste for narrative, and their interest in religious ethics and values. His family was well versed in the philosophies of William Morris and John Ruskin, a designer and an art critic, who savored the traditions of the past, from architecture to craft to a reverence for the small details of the world. Spencer would follow the lead of the Pre-Raphaelites in embedding religious figures in the modern world. Holman Hunt showed Jesus in his painting, The Light of the World (1853), wearing regal robes and a crown of thorns, knocking on the soul door of a nonbeliever. For Spencer, Jesus could appear anywhere and everywhere, even in the small village of Cookham, a place the son of God would frequently visit.

Spencer reached artistic maturity after the Great War, a time of generations “lost” and a period of spiritual disillusionment. Religious painting had been relegated to the past, but Spencer, who never paid attention to contemporary attitudes, took up what appeared to be his two major interests for the rest of his life: Religion and Sex. Having served as a common soldier on the Macedonia Eastern Front, Spencer was a survivor of a visit to hell that lasted years and burned away his young and innocence, but not his faith. Spencer later explained, in a quote from his biographer, Fiona McCarthy, that “During the war, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree or form of sexual love, carnal love, bestiality, anything you like to call it. These are the joyful inheritances of mankind.” It would be hard to find a more succinct definition of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, Les Années folles, than those words given by an immature and inexperienced young man, who realized he had been given a second chance at life. After witnessing so much death and despair, it was time to heal and celebrate life, make new lives, relish the joys of untroubled youth–or what was left of it.

The wartime experiences of Stanley Spencer totally explain his turn to sex as a force of love and religion, but what remains unclear is the extent to which he suffered psychological shock as a witness to human suffering. As if to aid those who had to remake the world after the Great War, Jesus often came to call, attending mundane local functions, blending in with the crowds. It matters not if he is seen only by Spencer or if the villagers of Cookham accept his causal presence as commonplace, the Savior has come to save and walks among those wounded in spirit and body. The style of these religiously themed paintings reflects the artist’s interest in the matter-of-fact art of the Renaissance, or what Erwin Panofsky called “disguised symbolism,”which reflects the belief that even the most ordinary events and the most domestic of objects are permeated with spiritualism and even holiness. The detail of Spencer’s religious paintings also recalls the obsession with precisely recreating a location in all its minute characteristics, each of which raises the level not just of authenticity but also of the efficacy of belief in God.

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Stanley Spencer. The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (1924-27)

But there is a deep paradox at the heart of these post-war paintings. On one hand there is the sacred and on the other hand there is the profane–part of the dualism of life. While his paintings with religious themes reveal a belief in miracles and a retreat into a deeply mystical streak, Spencer’s painted studies of the gulf between male and female seem not to heal but to wound. As a child of the twenties, Spencer seemed to have both benefited from the sexual freedom of the twenties and, perhaps, missed the point altogether. Although he was married three times and had a non-consummated relationship with a lesbian, who took advantage of the naïve man, Spencer was probably typical of his time–confronted with a new sexual freedom and burdened with sexual repression. His portraits of nudes, male and female, of himself and his signifiant others, are totally modern and utterly un-Renaisance. Spencer’s nudes were so frank that in 1950 and exhibition of his paintings caused Sir Alfred Munnings, the President of the Royal Academy to start criminal proceedings against him. The charge–obscenity. Classical nudes were apparently acceptable, modern nudes, however, were unacceptable.

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Stanley Spencer. Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife (Leg of Mutton Nude) (1937)

In photographs, especially with his female partners, Spencer, seems to be dapper but diminished: the women tower over him, their amplitude expanding next to him. They are full-figured modern women, confident with their bodies, stylish and independent. To see Spencer in these photographs is to be reminded that he was so small, his classmates at Slade had put him in a sack for fun. The sheer physical difference, the size, the sexual distinctions, between himself and the women, seemed to fascinate Spencer.

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He was never modern in the way of Édouard Manet, whose sophisticated prostitutes were statements of cynicism and artificiality, nor was Spencer seeking a “modern nude” in any kind of conscious or self-conscious fashion as Edgar Degas did. Instead, his nudes were naturalistic, painted with a disconcerting realism and immediacy that confounds the viewer. The nudes, male and female, fill the canvas with their modernist angst and crippling self-doubts that seem to be both soulful and physical. For Spencer, the female body is the ultimate mystery and he confronts it with fear and awe. Few artists have captured the way that the male feels before the uncovered and revealed female body, a gift and a threat, as powerfully and as tragically as Spencer. To paraphrase Kenneth Clark, who made a famous distinction between Nude and Naked, for Manet, the question was what does the “nude” mean in the nineteenth century? For Spencer, the question is what does it mean to be naked in the twentieth century? To be nude is to show oneself, unfurl oneself as a sexual being, carrying all the anxieties that a sexual encounter is so often fraught with into a freighted relationship with The Other.

Self-Portrait with Patricia Pearse, 1936, Stanley Spencer

Stanley Spencer. Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece (1936)

It is probable that the artist conceived of sex as a healing life force, a necessary counterbalance to the mass death of the Great War. As he said, “Love is the essential power in the creation of art and love is not a talent.  Love reveals and more accurately describes the nature and meaning of things than any mere lecture on technique can do. And it establishes once and for all time the final and perfect identity of every created thing.” Spencer was far more important in the art world than is acknowledged by art historians or art critics. His unique and original vision, positioned somewhere between Bosch, Breugel, and Botheo, was partly religious and partly sexual, each part being equally intense and complex. Unabashedly religious in a secular age and unabashedly sexual in an age of sexual repression, Stanley Spencer paved the way for Lucian Freud’s confrontational nudes. As Maureen Mullarkey wrote in a book review on Freud, “Before Lucian Freud there was Stanley Spencer (d.1959), among the most prominent and original British artists of the twentieth century. Look at any of Spencer’s paintings done from life—any nude or portrait— and you recognize Freud’s origins.”

The religious paintings far outnumber the nudes and, in their own way, reveal the artist’s sense of his own small size and slender frame. Jesus is healthy and rotund, comfortingly stuffed and round. He has adventures and visits Cookham, as well he should. Spencer, something of a Pantheist, saw God and holiness everywhere and had profound attachments to place, especially the Village of his birth. He was capable of imagining God and Jesus, with God as more of a presiding spirit, and Jesus as a regular visitor on earth, because it is the nature of religion, defined as a spiritual feeling, can be found everywhere. As Spencer said, “When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless.  Quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning, and this made everything holy.  The instinct of Moses to take his shoes off when he saw the burning bush was very similar to my feelings.  I saw many burning bushes in Cookham.  I observed the scared quality in the most unexpected quarters.”

1 Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta, Regatta,

In his last and unfinished painting, Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta (1958), God himself attends the local event, attesting to the presence of the Divine even in humble English villages. In one of his last statements about the themes that had nurtured him for four decades after the Great War, Spencer explained, in reference the to Regatta painting,  “This all expresses to me the fact that I want all to know that what they wish for will be received. That if the Regatta is voluptuous, then let it be so. The Christ talk is that their joy may be full. If it is carnal wishes, they will be fulfilled. If it is sexual desires or picture-making inspiration that is to be satisfied, then Christ will heave the capstan round. All will be met. Everything will be fulfilled in the symbol of the Regatta. The complete worshipfulness and lovableness of everything to do with love is meant in this Regatta scene. In that marvellous atmosphere nothing can go wrong.”

By the late fifties, the artist had lived through two wars, suffering the tragic realization that the war that was intended to end all wars, was merely a prelude for its sequel. What he sought and expressed so eloquently was a simple world of miracles, both spiritual and sexual, a place where “nothing can go wrong.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   

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If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.
Thank you.

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