Stanley Spencer [antikvár]

STANLEY SPENCER STANLEY SPENCER was bom in the village of Cookham-on-Thames in Berkshire in 1892 and has lived there most of his life. He studied at the Slade School from ipio to 1914. Those two brief statements contain almost all the information necessary for an understanding of his work as an artist. In Spencer's case the usual biographical outline is hardly relevant. What happened "to" Spencer counts for little as compared with what happened "in" him. Even a precis of his career — a precis in which words like "Paris", "influence", "development" are keywords, in which formative friendships are stressed, in which events and their dates are important — would not help to explain his paintings. Properly read, his pictures are, in themselves, an adequate autobiography. The reader will possibly enquire what keywords do apply to Stanley Spencer, and in what manner his pictures may be "properly read". The answer to the first question is easy. The keywords are two — "Cookham" and "The Bible". The second is a very difficult question indeed. This brief essay is an attempt to answer it. The fact that one finds oneself using a warning phrase hke "properly read" shows that Spencer is not to be approached in quite the normal way — the way in which one would approach, for example, Bonnard or Sickert or Toulouse-Lautrec. From them he is different not in degree but in kind. They express a sort of generalized delight in the spectacle of life and can make a picture out of any little random slice of it that catches the eye. With them what matters is their power to take life unawares and then turn it, deliciously, into paint : with them one rarely asks what this or that particular picture "means". One merely likes (or dislikes) their attitude to the visible world and the sensitive, painterly gifts 5