When, in 1980, the Royal Academy in London mounted a mammoth retrospective of the paintings and drawings of the English painter Stanley Spencer (1891–1959), the show was greeted by the British public as a major event—almost, indeed, as a national celebration. Newspapers devoted huge features to Spencer and to the village of Cookham, thirty miles west of London, where he lived most of his life and which features prominently in his work. Crowds in record numbers filled the capacious galleries of the Royal Academy—from which august institution, incidentally, Spencer had resigned in 1935. (He was protesting the Academy’s rejection of two paintings—The Dustman, or The Lovers, which is included in “Stanley Spencer: An English Vision” at the Hirshhorn Museum, and St. Francis and the Birds, which isn’t.) Critics did not hesitate to pronounce Spencer a great master, especially for his overscale religious allegories of village life—the same critics, by the way, who a few years later would be lavishing similar praise on The Naked Shit Pictures by Gilbert and George. Like the work of the latter, Spencer’s are pictures that often tell sexy stories—though the sex, in Spencer’s case, is strictly heterosexual—and there is nothing in art that the British public loves so much as pictures that tell stories. It only added to Spencer’s appeal that his work otherwise rejected just about everything associated with modern art—everything, that is, except sexual candor. At least for the duration of the Spencer retrospective at the Royal Academy, which numbered some 280 works, the British public could bask in the illusion that the modern movement had never come to Britain at all and dream for a while longer about the good old days before the frogs and the yanks spoiled everything.

It was not to be expected that “Stanley Spencer: An English Vision,” which began a North American tour at the Hirshhorn Museum this fall and early winter, would inspire anything like this celebratory response. On this side of the Atlantic, where Spencer’s work is known only to specialists in modern British painting, his English village allegories—a curious mix of Christian mythology, bawdy high jinks, and country-life folklore—merely look dated and quaint. In other words, provincial. This is partly because none of the artist’s mural-scale allegories—the pictures that English critics like to call “epic”—are included. (They were probably considered too large to travel.) Without those outsize pictures, however, the undaunted ambition that Spencer brought to his principal artistic project can scarcely be understood, never mind experienced at first hand. But it is also the case that Spencer’s was a provincial vision even in his most ambitious paintings.

Seeing the smaller versions of these allegories in the Washington exhibition, I was reminded of how essential those happy, milling crowds were to the whole spirit of the 1980 Royal Academy show. For between the myriad figures depicted in the paintings and the many live figures in the galleries looking at the paintings, there was an unmistakable physical resemblance and a distinct reciprocity of feeling. In Spencer’s folkloric vision of village life, the visitors to the exhibition saw something of themselves—or, more precisely, something out of an imagined common past—they obviously preferred to the more prosaic and disobliging contemporary world they were condemned to settle for in real life. This gave to the exhibition its persuasive atmosphere of yearning and nostalgia. That is not something that is within the power of many modern artists to achieve, but it is a power achieved at a price—for it nullifies the artist’s exportability. At the entrance to the show at the Hirshhorn Museum, visitors were advised that Spencer’s art had successfully transcended “his so-called Englishness,” but most of the paintings told a different story.

The principal exceptions are the so-called “sex pictures”—the nude portraits of Spencer himself and the two wives he was erotically obsessed with. In these and a few other portraits of women, Spencer becomes a quite different artist, a very modern hyper-Realist, cheerfully celebrating his sexual desires. There is no trace of religiosity, no village-life folklore, no more bother about communal ritual. There is only the homme moyen sensuel painting his desires without mythological artifice or religious subterfuge.

Spencer himself acknowledged the difference, of course. Speaking of the Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937), which is included in the Washington show, he observed that “there is none of my usual imagination in this thing: it is direct from nature and my imagination never works faced with objects or landscape.” Alas, he was usually a better artist when he put aside the burden of his busy imagination to paint directly from the passions that governed his own life. But it is the imaginary past that is conjured up in the “epic” allegories that has made him a hero in England. In Washington, however, where the galleries devoted to “Stanley Spencer” were almost empty on the afternoon I saw the exhibition, the few people in attendance—mainly artists and art students—were spending most of their time concentrating on the “sex pictures.” At least that part of the Spencer oeuvre has proved to be eminently exportable.

After Washington, the exhibition travels to the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (February 19–May 10, 1998) and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/California Palace of the Legion of Honor (June 8–September 6, 1998).