The crucifixion of ‘culturally insensitive’ Stanley Spencer
The Fitzwilliam has removed one of the artist’s works. Francesca Peacock reports on a growing debate
The Tate labels one work as reinforcing ‘racist stereotypes and divisions’
Earlier this week, it emerged that the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has decided that time is up for Stanley Spencer’s 1935 painting, Love Among the Nations. The work, which is half of a pair celebrating the idea of “free love” and shows people of several ethnicities kissing, had, until December, been displayed alongside a label which declared it was shaped by Spencer’s “ignorance” and “unquestioned racism”. Now, having been taken off display altogether amid a “rotation” of artworks, there are no plans for its return. A Fitzwilliam spokesman pointed to the “complexity and racist imagery” of Spencer’s work.
This latest development is just the most recent in a long line of outraged responses to Spencer’s disconcertingly sexual religious art. Perhaps his most famous painting, The Resurrection, Cookham (1924–7), is currently displayed at Tate Britain with a label that describes how the painting “reinforces racist stereotypes and divisions”. In fact, as early as 1950, Spencer’s Beatitudes of Love series of paintings proved too much for the then-president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings. After seeing the portraits of increasingly grotesque and lewd couples, he attempted to prosecute Spencer for obscenity.
Spencer trained at the Slade School in the early 20th century alongside the likes of Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. But while the other young artists were enjoying pre-war London, Spencer was nicknamed “Cookham” for his dedication to taking the train back to his childhood Berkshire village every evening. Using that beloved locale as a backdrop, he made his name with paintings that mixed religious grandeur
with profane grittiness. In his hands, Biblical stories were transformed into everyday scenes. The village became the setting for everything from the day of resurrection to down-atheel angels sat alongside village drunkards and cavorting children. And in almost every canvas, there is a pulsating sexuality, as heavenly fulfilment is matched by unbridled lust. Blessed buttocks are grabbed, breasts are groped, and couples are rarely afraid to undress.
In focusing on Spencer’s difficulties and controversies, are we at risk of consigning a great artist, and great work, to the dustbin of history? First, it is undeniable that both Love Among the Nations and The Resurrection, Cookham reproduce, even exaggerate, the racial stereotypes of the era. Spencer copied figures he had seen in National Geographic magazine, and, with little finesse, adorned them with supposedly “exotic” clothing and jewellery. In The Resurrection, Cookham the white figures emerging from graves are either from scripture or the village – Spencer’s first wife, the artist Hilda Carline, appears three times – while the black people at the
centre form a mere ill-defined mass. The difference in treatment is evident.
Much of Spencer’s art, however, was part of an attempt to make Biblical stories universal. If Christ can preach at Cookham Regatta, is there any real barrier between the religious and the earthly? When speaking to his first wife, Spencer told her: “The is-ness of you to me is like the is-ness of God.” This approach to religion was paired with his vision of free and unbridled sexuality; a belief that had a connection to the 1930s utopian “free love” that gained traction in the years after the First World War (which Spencer spent serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps).
A spokesman for the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, the largest collection of the artist’s
‘Much of Spencer’s work is about love between people of all faiths and backgrounds’
work, points to this period: “Having experienced the devastation of the Great War first-hand, much of Stanley’s work is about the notion of reconciliation and love between people of all faiths and backgrounds. As such, and in the spirit of Stanley’s work, we welcome everyone into the gallery.”
Spencer’s inclusion of multiple ethnicities in these paintings, then, however misguided and flawed his depictions may seem, was at least born of a wish to make his earthly visions of Christianity and the sanctity of sexual love applicable to everyone. For him, erotic desire was not something to be looked down upon but exalted. Later, when remembering the Great War, he recalled how he often thought “the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual love, carnal love, bestiality”. According to his biographer Kenneth Pople, Spencer therefore painted the limited sphere of Cookham “being lifted in surprise from the world of accepted convention into another and more meaningful world”.
However, Sophie Richards, who curated a recent exhibition of four generations of the Carline Family’s work at Burgh House, disagrees with this philosophical interpretation of the sexualised tableau in Love Among the Nations. For her, Spencer’s painting, and his use of racial stereotypes, betrays “influences of George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, an anti-abolitionist caricature [from 1819], and arguably one of the most racist prints ever produced”. She argues that “Spencer’s intent may have been benign, [but] the impact of his work is not”.
Even if Spencer would have denied the accusations of racism, he was aware that the style of his art and the sincerity of religious visions were well outside the mainstream. With respect to The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1929), he railed against those who didn’t understand his art: “What is so disconcerting to me is to find that people are not in the least moved by the sort of religious ‘urges’ I get… How is it they cannot see that this picture is a sort of vast communion of saints?”
In a letter to The Telegraph last week, Isobel Greenshields, whose parents were founder members of the Cookham Arts Club, and who met Spencer as a young girl, notes the “saintly” aspect of Spencer’s work. In a more secular age, this non-traditional religiosity has become increasingly difficult to parse. (It probably does Spencer limited benefit to note that Eric Gill, another major artist at recent risk of cancellation, praised his compatriot’s religious works in exactly those terms: as “piety” that should be “worshipped”.)
There is no denying that some of Spencer’s works have become more difficult to love. They are saturated in a religious context that is deeply foreign to viewers now, and some are the type of sexually charged paintings that DH Lawrence might have produced had he more facility with a brush. Either way, however, Spencer at his best is still something to be marvelled at, from his delight in tiny, Hieronymus Bosch-like details, to canvases that appear so full of life as to spill over their frames, and a facility at depicting sexual tension that would inspire artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Above all, if we start to remove them from public view, we deny people the chance to judge Spencer’s hallucinatory visions for themselves.