Page 64 - Studio International - March 1972

alongside a number of martyrs including Van could make out, and a compulsive exhibitionist. married. Their wedding night they spent apart:
Gogh, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, But the common view of his art which he played and until he died, in 1959, Spencer was to
Artaud, Mozart and Shelley. Periodic lapses up with enthusiasm, even fervour, does not Patricia a visitant rather than a husband. At the
into romantic self-indulgence are entirely fit the facts. start Patricia thought Spencer a benevolent
counterbalanced by aphorisms which display `I am', he told me shortly before his death mystic. With the passage of time he stood
his wry humour. I had assumed that this limited (as he had told many over the years), 'quite revealed as a demon of selfishness. He was, she
edition book would be around £2-£3; only simply an inspirational: the pictures are tells us, utterly unable to manage human
after reading it did I notice that its price is 45p, God-given and given whole (the actual business relationships and sought to create on paper and
which is, to say the least, good value. It is also of drawing and painting is routine) and they canvas a dream world in which he acted the
a very pleasant change not to have an analytical amount to a vision of Paradise here on earth-in deity. He acted further roles, many of them
text. Wols: Aphorisms and Pictures is a small front of my work there can be only joy.' He did true: but even when undergoing abasement he
unpretentious art-book that genuinely confess to occasional lapses of visionary power and his desires were the focus, for, in a sense,
stimulates thought, which is more than one can though, and, indeed, to a gradual weakening of he was the single real person around. She gives
say for most of the elephantine coffee-table celestial fluence from c.1922. us the impression that Spencer's artistic career
volumes which clutter up the place. One However, under close scrutiny Spencer's art was an attempt to build every fragment of his
splendid page of observations about work seems less straightforward. Rodney Burn once experience, sight, touch, smell, sound, into the
(nothing to do with busyness) and concentration asked why the Tate Gallery's Portrait of an dream-softening awkward edges, recomposing
(nothing to do with brow-furrowing and Artist was treble life-size. Oh, said Spencer, it the behaviour of those he came across outside
nail-biting) show Wols at his best; they provide began small and grew, altering constantly, the dream into elaborate ritual patterns derived
a salutory reminder. beneath my hand-the limits of the canvas from extravagantly wilful readings of the Bible.
So too does George Grosz; today there alone put a stop to transformation. The Portrait He tried to live his fantasies and, necessarily,
would seem to be amongst thinking artists a is dated 1913, when God's word, Spencer failed. Much energy, for example, went on
general crisis of identity; a slow realization, claimed, came through both loud and clear. persuading Hilda the divorced to continue as
albeit rather late in the day, of a credibility gap Elsewhere, too, one may discover signs of paramour: they slept together, apparently,
between isolationist art activity and being a second-thought and, at moments, radical while Patricia prepared her honeymoon
member of a society based on production for change of mind. The Tate's Resurrection cottage in Cornwall. Two wives', Patricia
greed. However, particularly in the so-called (finished 1927), to Spencer a major achievement, reports, 'were the very least he could do with.
`avant garde', artists vacillate between cost nearly four years of immense labour and It might be that he would find he required
narcissism and masochism, or go round and abounds in pentimenti. It was, actually, when more. He ought to have the right to make love
round in ever-decreasing circles. So, it still (by his own account) inspiration faltered that to every girl who passed ... ' But, alas, Hilda's
comes as a bit of a shock to look at the early Spencer's procedure levelled off, and it never, agreeableness stopped short and Patricia was
drawings of George Grosz, an artist who was I believe, became merely mechanical. He distraught, increasingly antagonistic. No matter.
certainly at odds with the society in which he showed me several 'corrections' to Christ Spencer soon moved to Wangford, scene of his
lived, yet who neither acquiesced nor gave in to Preaching at Cookham Regatta III (1954) and honeymoon with Hilda, renting their former
despair, but fought to define his position and suggested more. room. 'He would', Patricia recalls, 'enjoy
managed at least to know his enemies and to pin One must query the notion (which the artist caressing the pillows on which she had lain,
down their images like stuck butterflies. These assiduously cultivated) that Spencer owed the curtains she had drawn back each morning
images retain their power : walking through the little or nothing to his fellows. He did gear into ...there would be the drawers where she had
City with the book under my arm I saw the the contemporary art situation. He shared with kept clothes he remembered in every detail...
same faces, the same brutal greed. And his several others a taste for certain kinds of popular He could re-visit all the lanes they had walked
vicious drawing 'The same ones all the time' art and looked back to masters, notably the on, and the hedges behind which they had
could be of any London art gallery cocktail Italian 'Primitives', whom colleagues were embraced. He looked forward to many
party. It's a shame that his work still remains in finding admirable. There are traces of an imaginary conversations. These would be far
art-books; he drew for magazines and interest in African sculpture, Oceanic carving, more fruitful than those they might have had
newspapers and I would like to see the and Oriental illumination. But if Spencer had in reality, because she argued so and insisted
`alternative press' reproduce his work, models, these were made to serve new ends. on bringing in Christian Science...' Ultimately,
because it is that rare thing : documentary Behind his simplistic exegesis of his work, the the artist's head hummed with 'a whole new set
drawing which has more power than declamation of Biblical texts, the naming of of pictures on the theme of absolute sexual
photographs. people and places (here is Sarah Tubb, here an freedom'.
Incidentally, those readers who have had the angel, they are in Cookham Village Street), Patricia emphasizes her husband's
all-too-common experience of large paperback one glimpsed, while no more than glimpsed, a preoccupation with sex: it pervades not just
books falling to pieces as each page is turned mass of extremely personal meaning. one series but the entire oeuvre. Spencer's
might note that this book is signature-sewn, Now, A Private View of Stanley Spencer, sexuality, we gather, never got past, perhaps
opening flat. As the back-page puff states : 'this put together by Louise Collis from talks with hardly reached, adolescence. The book contains
is a permanent book.... Designed for years of the artist's second wife, brings us somewhat a quantity of riveting information about clothes
use!' q close to this personal meaning and urges fetishism, necrophiliac tendencies, and that
IAN BREAKWELL qualification of the public image. It is an obsessive concern with the bodily functions
intriguing document. It presents, with awful which often accompanies the awakening of
God-given demon blandness (the result, I guess, of deep hurt), a libido.
A Private View of Stanley Spencer by Louise man who was a horror-though a horror for This is compelling stuff. But a good deal,
Collis. 166 pp with 16 illustrations. whom, at a safe distance, one may feel I must say, is missing from the account.
Heinemann. £2. 75. considerable sympathy. Despite graphic descriptions of Spencer on the
Patricia Preece, a painter, met Spencer job, so to speak-'he liked to perch on the edge
`As a man is, so he sees', we learn, and are during 1929, in Cookham's cafe. He enchanted of the bath, facing the lavatory and breathing its
aghast: time and again, being relates to seeing her (the word 'enchanted' I use advisedly). smells, which he found most stimulating and
in such devious ways. Stanley Spencer was an They became lovers and eventually, in 1937, conducive to the higher imaginative flights'
unusually self-conscious creature, so far as I after Spencer's divorce by Hilda Carlin, they -and a few sharp notes about the look of the
138