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,
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Exhibition note
On Stanley Spencer: An English Vision at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 Number 5, on page 43
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