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Room 1 I Room
2 I Room 3 I Room
4 I Room 5 I Room 6
Room 5: The Church of Me
'During the war, when I contemplated the horror of my life
and the lives of those around me, I felt that 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, anything you like to call it.'
While painting his murals for the Oratory of All Souls at
Burghclere, Spencer imagined another 'Chapel of Peace' in
which he would bring together his most visionary and personal
works. In this 'Church-House' or 'Chapel of Me', he would
achieve a fusion of domestic and sacred, home and place of
worship, spirit and desiring body. Its design would mirror
the topography of Cookham. It would include bedroom-chapels
and even bathrooms and lavatories, and the fireplace would
become an altar, complete with painted altarpiece.
The Church-House was never built. Yet in the paintings he
dreamed of hanging there, Spencer attempted to embody a recovered
vision, in which Cookham and its lumpy-faced inhabitants are
brought together with his emergent sexual gospel. It is significant
that the scenes of redemptive love-making are centred on Cookham
war memorial, for example in A Village in Heaven 1937
(no.86). An additional inspiration came from seeing photographs
of the temples of Khajuraho in India, encrusted with hundreds
of figures making love - or, in Spencer's phrase, 'assembled
in sexuality'.
In these, the strangest collisions that Spencer contrived
between Cookham and the scriptures, the Biblical story reappears
almost as a local folk tale, while the villagers become monstrous
grotesques, whose orgies may seem to fall far short of the
Divine. At their most extreme, for example Adoration of
Old Men 1937 (no.80), these pictures seem close to insanity.
The Foxes
Have Holes, 1939
Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
© Estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights resrved DACS
2001
Spencer embarked on the Christ in the Wilderness series
(nos 94 - 96) in the winter of 1938 - 9, while himself displaced
and living in Swiss Cottage (and reading Walden, by
the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau). This
area of London was a haven to many refugees from Nazi Germany,
and here Christ is depicted as a dispossessed person. Spencer's
essential subject here is solitude and man's kinship to animals
- even to a scorpion. In the hybrid structure of the Church-House,
the Wilderness series would have been set in the roof
of the main chapel or on a 'mantel piece shrine'.
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