in appreciation of THE ART of STANLEY SPENCER
For updated webpages on this site please go to www.stanleyspencer.co.uk
Introduction
At some time during the 1930s the poet Ezra Pound, we are told, was on a visit to a thousand-year old church in Italy and was descending the steps from the nave to the crypt when he chanced to see on the base of one of the church's great arcaded columns the name in Latin of the individual mason who had built it, carved by his own hand.
No doubt thousands of churchgoers over the last thousand years had seen the name and thought little of it. But Pound was dumbstruck, felled by what he called one of his 'moments of illumination'. In that instant, for him, the centuries vanished and mankind's ancient and universal desire for immortality was made manifest. Why else do lovers carve their names on trees?
To poets, artists and composers, these moments, these 'epiphanies' as James Joyce called them, come more frequently than to the rest of us. Not only do they startle by their arrival, but the beneficiary is gripped by the urge to have us join him or her in the experience. So they tell it as a novelist, chant it as a poet, transcribe it as a musician, carve it as a sculptor or paint it as an artist. Stanley Spencer was one such .
But these creative artists, in their urge to have us join them in their experience, face a challenge. At the moment of illumination, each finds himself in two worlds, two modes if one prefers. For an instant he/she is a split personality, existing in both the present and the timeless, while we groundlings remain firmly in the present. The interesting question then is how does the artist reconcile the two worlds in the telling or the showing of the experience?
This website sets out to explain some of the ways in which Stanley Spencer managed the reconciliation. It is intended to help understand his sometimes puzzling paintings
Web references.
www.cookham.com provides comprehensive information and news about the village, about Stanley Spencer there, and about the Stanley Spencer Gallery.
www.tate.org.uk offers details and illustrations of the major UK collection of Spencer's paintings and drawings.
Further Reading.
The standard reference work is Stanley Spencer, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, by Keith Bell, published 1991 by Phaidon. The full Catalogue is exhaustive and expensive, but an abridged softback version at about £27 contains over 300 of Spencer's best-known works, and offers a most useful study guide.
Stanley Spencer, Letters and Writings, by the Tate Gallery Archivist Andrew Glew, published in 2001 at some £15 by Tate Publications, is an illustrated and fully-annotated chronological selection of the artist's writings, providing unique insight into his developing outlook.
Stanley Spencer by Kitty Hauser, also from Tate Publications 2001 at about £7, offers an introductory overview of the artist's work and life.
The host.
Kenneth Pople has been studying the art and writings of Stanley Spencer for some thirty years. He wrote the acclaimed centenary biography, Stanley Spencer, published by Collins in 1991. It went through two paperback editions before going out of print in 1997.
His e-mail address in kenpople@hotmail.com although he regrets that he can no longer offer to vet student theses, nor to download attachments.
The website
Ideally the website should be read in sequence, as each page is intended to lead on to the next.
Contents.