STANLEY SPPNCER'S PRIVATE EYE

Spotlight

The EngIish were so busy building and running an empire that they forgot how to paint-or maybe they were never any good at it. Either way, only a dozen English painters of true standing came along during the two centuries after 1750. Judg I~y e current exhibition at Tate Britain, it is clear that o hese was Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), the o isionary son of Cookham, a srnol~ viltage in the Tha Valley. With their simple religious fervor, play fulness, metumes autistic detachment, Spencer s canvases are to categorize. Howevei,The orgar~4 rs of all major exhibitions feel the need to provide som~ I reviv~'or revisionist script, and this show of more~than' 100 paintings and drawings duly attempts to place him in the mainstream of art history, with an ancestry that goes back to Samuel Palmer and a cd~sinage that ex tends in his own century to Max o,LD1X, and Balthus. Each of these artists ha -sonal vision, and in Spencer's case the scrutiny o world was so obsessive that you sometimes wonde, whether he is seeing tije sublect for the first time. In one of his most famous pictures, Double Nu~de Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife-a self-portrait with Patricia Preece-he crouches naked beside the reclining nude with his pendulous genitalia rendered as coldly as a bowl of fruit. This objeclivily could come only from alien ation, where the unwavering focus achieves the same effect as repeating a word over and over until it be comes strange and meaningless. Stanley Spencer was twice stirred from the excep tionally quiet existence at Cookham, when Britain went to war in 1914 and in 1939. He served in ReId hospitaI~~ for the length of the First World War and became a wa~f' artist in the Second. Both periods `enlarged his experi e~ce and were undoubtedly good for the range and depth of his work. But he remained incorrigibly private. He once wrote, "Cooped up as I am in myself, I gaze out on my own chicken run and feel I could write a chap ter in~ch ridge of mud, or scratched hole or nettle or claw mark I prefer to have no gre~tsi world." And that iswherein hisgreatness lies.

HENRY PORTER