Zacharias
and Elizabeth 1913-14
Tate and Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust
© Estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved, DACS
2001 |
Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959) was one of the most original
British painters of his generation. His art had two high points:
a very early flowering in the years just before the First
World War, culminating in his masterpiece Zacharias and
Elizabeth 1913 - 14 (no.14), completed at the age of twenty-two;
and the strange, complex period of the mid-1930s, when marital
and stylistic crisis propelled Spencer into a flow of extraordinary
paintings. Most previous accounts, including Spencer's own,
have tended to interpret all the work after 1915 as a quest
for some lost wholeness; but it was only through a 'loss of
Eden' that Spencer was able fully to participate in the experience
of the inter-war years, as well as to embark on an exploration
of sexuality and selfhood unparalleled among his British contemporaries.
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The exhibition is drawn from the whole range of Spencer's achievement.
Juxtaposing paintings and drawings, it presents Spencer not as a
merely eccentric or provincial English oddity, but as a major twentieth-century
artist whose work is linked thematically and stylistically to the
painting of his time, and closely engaged with the changing nature
of modern experience. There are early religious pictures included
here, and works depicting Spencer's military service in Macedonia
- an experience that would also generate the great murals painted
between 1927 and 1932 for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere.
However, the images at the heart of the exhibition (rooms 3, 4 and
5) show how a prolonged crisis of the 1930s produced an enormous
yet fruitful tension between the once-harmonised visionary and realist
strands in Spencer's imagination.
Closing with late works, including Spencer's famous paintings of
ship-building in Port Glasgow during the Second World War, and with
autobiographical masterpieces such as Love Letters 1950 (no.109),
the exhibition charts the insights of an artist exploring and developing
across five decades, in what he himself called 'a wonderful desecration'.
Timothy Hyman, artist and writer
Patrick Wright, cultural historian
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