Stanley Spencer: An English Expressionist?

Stanley Spencer: An English Expressionist? Many of those who witnessed the horrors of the Great War never spoke of the things they had seen, or the hardships that they had endured. Most got on with their lives as well as they could. Some returned home changed men; strangers to their loved ones. Haunted, restless, empty of all emotion or too full of it, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Except PTSD hadn’t been invented yet, so it was called shell shock, or madness, or just plain cowardice. After the guns were silent, artists began to record and interpret the things they had seen and experienced, channelling the despair they felt at the futility of war, or the guilt of surviving when so many comrades had fallen. Henry Lamb, Mark Gertler, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson all created images which have become enduring visions the First World War. During the conflict and in its aftermath, artistic reaction boiled over into the creation of art movement after art movement. Dada, Novembergruppe, Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism and many others. All claimed to reject previous forms of expression, all claimed to be radical, and few outlived their founders. Stanley Spencer never joined any art movement. He wasn’t a joiner by nature. Every day, whilst a student at The Slade, he would leave his fellow students in London and return to his beloved Cookham. Such was his love of place that he would be nicknamed ‘Cookham’ by his contemporaries. Cookham would be his muse, his inspiration, his obsession. It is common practice, however, in art historical terms to try to fit artists into a particular grouping or movement. Spencer is one artist who refuses to be put into any particular box. Some writers have tried to fit Spencer into a group of artists associated with Puvis de Chavannes. There seems little evidence for this other than Spencer was a student of the Slade School of Art which, at that time, was dominated by the influence of its illustrious and infamous former student Augustus John. John had most definitely been influenced by de Chavannes when he painted his ‘Lyric Fantasy’ (1913-14) and other ‘Gypsy Fantasy’ murals. If Stanley Spencer is part of a group, it is as one of a generation of artists whose experiences in the First World War affected their work for years to come. And if he can be connected with any art movement, if only in motivation, style and compositional terms, then some elements of German Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit in particular, would appear the most constructive comparison. If Spencer was a kind of English Expressionist though, it is an expressionism with a bible in its hand, and Giotto in its heart. Spencer said that he found a ‘Heaven in a hell of war’. ‘I had buried so many people and saw so many dead bodies that I felt that death could not be the end of everything’. (Birmingham Post 7/3/27 quoted in Bell, 1992, p.76). And it was out of this feeling born of his religious and spiritual nature that Stanley began to think of the idea of resurrection. He painted his first great resurrection masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’, between 1924-6 (Oil on canvas 274cm x 549cm, Tate Gallery, London). But the full outpouring of his feeling about the war and his part in it had begun to take form in his mind and his sketchbooks almost as soon as he returned home in 1919. ‘The Resurrection of soldiers’ is painted in oil onto canvas and fixed to east wall of Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere Hampshire. It was painted between 1928 and 1929, taking Stanley almost a year to complete and, unlike the other paintings in the chapel, it was designed after the completion of the building in 1926. Sandham Memorial Chapel was commissioned by John-Louis and Mary Behrend after seeing Stanley’s drawings for a proposed memorial chapel, when they visited Henry Lamb’s house where Stanley was staying in 1921. The Chapel was constructed to Spencer’s design, and the interior decoration was inspired by Giotto’s frescoes in the fourteenth-century Arena Chapel in Padua (a small book on which Stanley had carried with him throughout the war). Rather than the usual depictions of war and battle, death and destruction, Stanley shows us a soldier’s life, the mundane and everyday existence which must fill most of the time of the ordinary serviceman. Although the chapel is dedicated to the memory of John Sandham, the brother of Mary Behrend who was killed in action in Macedonia, all of the paintings are personal recollections of Stanley’s own experiences. Starting from his time as a medical orderly at Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol to active service in the Balkans and Macedonia, the series leads to the Resurrection which forms the Altarpiece. ‘The Burghclere memorial … redeemed my experience from what (war) was,’ Spencer explained, ‘namely something alien to me.’ (Robinson, 2011, p.14) In the painting soldiers return to life in what is a scene of peace. Men shake hands or turn to greet one another. In the centre left, a man is cut out of barbed wire whist another contemplates his cross. The whole scene is dominated by the plain white crosses which are stacked up in the centre foreground and have the appearance of being piled on the actual altar. Some men hand their crosses to Christ who is seen in the mid-background. Stanley wrote: ‘This cross was placed on the graves, or wherever men fell was placed there, as a symbol of hope for their ultimate resurrection & redemption & was looked upon & thought of such’. (Notebook, 6th December 1947 in Glew, 2001, p.142). He also noted: ‘The truth that the Cross is supposed to symbolize in this picture is that nothing is lost where sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding … it very much influenced me in deciding the behaviour of the men. They are all, for instance, meant to be happy.’ (Carline, 1978, p.162) Another man lies between two resurrecting mules in the centre of what appears to be a stream. This was based on a recollection of a dead Bulgarian mule team he had seen during the war in Macedonia. ‘They are lying on the ground in the same order as when they were harnessed to the timber wagon…. It is that I once saw a scene very similar of fallen riders between the mules’ (Carline, 1978, p.194). Stanley saw himself as the man lying there as this, he thought, would be a position of comfort and safety likening it to himself as a child laying on the bed between his parents. Although technically un-resurrectable, the mules play an important role in the composition, reflecting the significant role they played in the Macedonian campaign as the main form of transport, and the fact that Spencer had grown very fond of them. The painting leaves out one element from the tradition of altar paintings: there is no sense here of a last judgement. Instead Spencer wanted the Resurrection to signify a kind of ‘release’. All the paintings in the chapel lead to this final release, a kind of spiritual reconciliation. In the decade that followed the end of the First World War, memorials to the fallen sprung up all over the country. There is not a town, village or hamlet that was not touched by the war; every family lost somebody it seems. And in this outpouring of national grief many fine works of art were created, dedicated to this national sense of loss. Most of these public tributes are what we would now think of as traditional, still influenced by Art Nouveau, untouched by the emerging Modernism. They are predominantly sculptural, and designed by some of the most notable artists of the day such as Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934), Eric Gill (1882-1940), and Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959). Spencer’s murals, whilst being a private rather than a public commission, stand out as one of the most original memorials to the fallen of the Great War. Many other painters contributed to our understanding of the war through their work however, sharing their own experiences, such as C.R.W. Nevinson’s ‘Paths of Glory’ (1917) (Fig.2.) which shows dead soldiers tangled in the wire. Paul Nash painted the devastation of the battlefield in ‘We Are Making a New World’ (1918) (Fig.3.) whilst his brother, John Nash shows us his experiences fighting with the Artists Rifles in ‘Over the top’ (1918) (Fig.4.) No other artist, though, produced anything on the scale of Spencer. The Sandham Memorial Chapel is quite unique, not only as a Great War Memorial but as possibly the only example of a renaissance style decorated chapel completed in England since the reformation. Historian Simon Schama has described it as ‘the most powerful art to emerge from the carnage of the Great War’. (Schama, 1997, p.50) Spencer’s figurative paintings are of modern life but reference stylistic ideas from the Old Masters, and in this he can be compared not only with his fellow British artists Edward Burra and William Roberts but also with the work of the German Neue Sachlichkeit artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Scholz. Spencer had taken part in the second 1912 exhibition of Post-impressionism organised by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, with whom he had later fallen out, but this was not due to a rejection of the Avant-Garde. Spencer’s art is a continuation of the figurative and narrative tradition in English painting which draws from and absorbs the influences of modern art. Spencer’s art is always a personal view with himself at the centre. He retained a personal faith and an ability to find God in all the things he loved, but his faith was very much his own. He never conformed to any particular doctrine, except for that of his own devising, probably in part due to his non-conformist upbringing in his home village of Cookham. Max Beckmann turned against religion. ‘My pictures are a reproach to God for all that he does wrong’, he said in 1919 (Dempsey, 2002 p.149). But like Spencer, Beckmann put himself at the centre of his art and used the language of sacred art as a vehicle for his compositions. In his painting, ‘Christus und die Sünderin,’ (1917) (Fig.5.) Beckmann quite clearly paints himself as Christ. Beckmann was to use the Triptych as a pictorial vehicle for much of his career. One of his early experiments with the form remained unfinished. His ‘Resurrection’ painted between 1916 and 1918 (Fig.6.) differs from Spencer’s in that his is a vision of the dead, ‘the inescapable downfall of the world with no hope of salvation through judgement from on high’ (Kruszynski, 2003, p.103). The scrawny figures in Beckmann’s painting with their stretched limbs and contorted faces recall the experiences of war captured in many of his drawings. It is in this stretching and contorting of the figures that we see similarities between Spencer and Beckmann. Both artists employ this technique as a compositional tool; a way to bring harmony, or discord, to an overall design concept. This must be an influence drawn from Cubism, though neither artist had any intention of abandoning form altogether, as the Vorticists did, for example. Both artists put themselves at the centre of their work and developed a highly personal vision and style. According to Beckmann, ‘Art resolves through form the many paradoxes of life, and sometimes permits us to glimpse behind the dark curtain that hides those unknown spaces where one day we shall be unified’ (Buenger, 1997, p.320). Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection of Soldiers’ stands out as a significant work within the canon of English painting, drawing its compositional elements from tradition, personal experience and modern life. Spencer aimed to reconcile himself with his experience, to heal the wounds of war by combining the commonplace with the miraculous and to let us glimpse behind his dark curtain and shed light on his unknown spaces. He struggled with personal relationships for most of his life and would return to the theme of resurrection many times over the years, but he would never have the opportunity to fulfil his artistic vision on such a scale again. By resurrecting the dead soldiers, his fallen comrades, with Christ in heaven, he was able to feel he had given them, at least, a happy ending. References Ades, D (1974) ‘Dada and Surrealism’, in Strangos, Nikos. (ed.) Concepts of Modern Art. Themes and Hudson. Bell, K (1992) ‘Stanley Spencer’, Phaidon. Bell, K (1980) ‘Stanley Spencer RA’, Royal Academy of Arts 20/9/80 – 14/12/80 Exhibition Catalogue. Royal Academy of Arts. Buenger, B. C. (1997) ‘Max Beckmann; Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements’. University of Chicago Press. Carline, R (1978) ‘Stanley Spencer at war’. Faber and Faber. Dempsey, A. (2002) ‘Styles, Schools & Movements’. Thames and Hudson. Glew, A (ed.) (2001) ‘Stanley Spencer Letters and Writings’, Tate Gallery Publishing. Kruszynski, A (2003) ‘Beckmann and the Triptych: A sacred form in the context of Modernism’, in Rainbird, S. (ed.) ‘Max Beckmann’. Tate Gallery. Robinson, D (2011) ‘Stanley Spencer in Retrospect’, in Parissien, S. (ed.) Stanley Spencer and the English Garden. PHP. Schama, S. (1997) ‘The Church of me’, The New Yorker, (February 17, 1997) P.50 Fig.1. ‘The Resurrection of Soldiers’. oil on canvas fixed to east wall of Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere Hampshire. 640x526cm (National Trust) Fig.2. C.R.W. Nevinson. ‘Paths of Glory’ (1917) oil on canvas 46cm x 61cm. (Imperial War Museum) Fig.3. Paul Nash. ‘We are making a new world’ (1918) oil on canvas 71cm x 91cm. (Imperial War Museum) Fig.4. John Nash. ‘Over the top’, 1st Artists Rifles at Marcoing 30th December 1917. (1919) Oil on canvas 80cm x 108cm (Imperial War Museum) Fig.5. Max Beckmann. Christus und die Sünderin, (1917). Oil on canvas 149 x 126 (St. Louis Museum of Art) Fig.6. Max Beckmann. ‘Resurrection II’. (Unfinished) 345cm x 497cm. (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.) Page 1 of 1