I have been making a film about erotic art. So, naturally, I have had to seek out the paintings of Stanley Spencer. When it comes to edgy English sexology, Spencer is the gold standard. Or is that the blue standard?
But there’s a problem. For a basket of interwoven reasons his paintings have become difficult to locate and film. He was prolific and produced an abundance of art in his eccentric life (1891-1959). But the modern world has taken against him, and surprisingly little of his work is on display in Britain’s museums. Edgy Stanley, you feel, has irked the art establishment.
The reluctance to show him can be traced back to 2022, when Tate Britain updated the signage for his visionary masterpiece The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-7) after the painting was accused of reinforcing racial stereotypes. Described by one of my predecessors in The Times as “the most important picture painted by an English artist” in the 20th century, it ought always to be on display, but currently isn’t. When you irk the Tate, you disappear from the plate.
In the painting, Spencer wanted to gather the whole world, white and black, for the Day of Judgment. As was his wont, he located this huge biblical moment in the tiny churchyard of his home village of Cookham, in Berkshire. Assorted locals modelled for the white faces in the painting. The black faces were based on images he found in National Geographic.
All of this was, of course, intended as symbolism. The Day of Judgment had not actually happened in Cookham. It was a vision. And symbolism is not reality. But Spencer was chastised for representing black people in “a generalising way”. And the picture was removed.
Much the same happened at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where Spencer’s comic frieze showing Love Among the Nations — the whole world hugging and loving each other — was dismissed to the stores in 2023 for caricaturing the black figures in the picture.
The knock-on effect of these noisy dismissals — and I’m finally getting back to my film and its erotic art — was to diminish the enthusiasm for Spencer in Britain and banish much of his work to museum basements. Never before have I had to spend so much time in dark stores pulling out racks of pictures. Spencer loved the sunshine. At the moment, it’s being denied to him.
But not, hallelujah, in Cookham. Removing Spencer from his home village would be like extracting the motor from a car. Cookham runs on Stanley Spencer, just as he ran on Cookham. His spirit haunts the local pub so fiercely that its B&B rooms are named after the women in his life. Go past the local telephone box and a photo of him stares out at you. Everything you see here — the bridge, the churchyard, the river, the war monument — feels as if it is based on his paintings, when really it was the other way round.
At the centre of the village-wide commemoration sits the Stanley Spencer Gallery, one of the most pleasing little museums in Britain, and the only one I can think of in which an artist and his location are so inextricably linked. Most museums feel like a public duty. This one feels like a labour of love. Housed in the former Methodist chapel in which Spencer worshipped as a child, the gallery is a resonant location and a fine collection of his art.
Spencer had two painting modes. In his religious symbolism he liked to stray into the comic. In the amusing The Last Supper that hangs in his gallery, Jesus and the apostles take up a quarter of the picture while their huge bony feet dominate the rest. The religious art seems often to strike a seaside postcard note. When it comes to being recorded in “a generalising way” no one in Spencer’s art is as heavily generalised as God.
So that’s one of his modes. His other mode, the severely realist one, is where it gets itchy. Not just erotic, but deep and strange.
One of the joys of the Spencer Gallery is that it is run by volunteers who know everything about him. They do tours of the village with you, pointing out key locations. If you do yourself the favour of going on one, ask to see the house of Patricia Preece.
Preece is the woman in Spencer’s harsh portrayals of English love. In half a dozen unflinching scenes of nakedness, he examines her body minutely: every wrinkle, every sag, every stray strand of pubic hair. What’s fascinating about these startling images is that they manage somehow to be bursting with desire, yet be simultaneously harsh and even cruel.
The whole thing gets weirder still when you consider the facts of Spencer’s relationship to Preece. When he met her he was already married to Hilda, who is the subject of an exquisite drawing in the Spencer Gallery in which she has her hair down. And Preece was a lesbian who lived in the village with her companion, Dorothy Hepworth, another painter.
However, for Spencer she was prepared to extend her sexual tastes and they embarked on an angsty relationship that climaxed with Spencer divorcing Hilda and marrying Patricia. That done, he began fantasising about a threesome with the two women. They refused. Preece kicked him out. He ended up with neither of them.
I’m skating over the story. There is a lot more to it than that. But if you get yourself down to Cookham and visit the various locations in which it unfolded, you can still sense the penile throbbing of Spencer’s nervy English sensuality. That’s village life for you.
That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta is at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, Apr 3-Nov 2, stanleyspencer.org.uk