Angels and dirt

Martin Gayford

Stanley Spencer', wrote the late A.J. Ayer in his autobiography, 'remains in my mind as the most self-centred man I ever met. His gnome-like appearance was not unappealing, and I could bear with his minor eccentricities, such as .. . his wearing pyjamas as underclothes. It was his con

versation that wore me down.'

There, viewed through the hostile eyes of a supremely worldly and rational contemporary, is the standard image of Spencer — as an oddity, an eccentric, and, if you are an admirer, a 'visionary'. It is a picture of Spencer that the new exhibition at Tate Britain tries with some success to question and qualify.

It is true that he began, as a young man, very much in the style of Samuel Palmer a century before, by painting the English landscape as seen in a mystic light. While across the Channel, and elsewhere in Britain, cubists, vorticists, futurists and other artistic revolutionaries were at work, Spencer was producing paintings of biblical events taking place in and around his native Thames-side village of Cookharn. But even those paintings, 'The Nativity' (1912), for example, and the non-biblical 'Mending Cowls' (1915), show a peculiar emphasis on not particularly mystical features of Cookham.

These early works have a dewy imaginative quality that could be called visionary. When he came home from school as a boy, he wrote, he entered 'a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and not to belong to the morning.' The man who painted those paintings, however, faced enormous shocks in the following years in the form of Love and War — or, more precisely, service as a stretcher-bearer in the first world war, a disastrous adulterous affair and equally disastrous divorce. He emerged, in the Thirties, a very different artist. What kind of different artist, though, is not easy to say.

The exhibition, and catalogue, are inclined to try to put him in historical context. Comparisons are made between the remarkable nude paintings he made of his second wife, Patricia Preece, and the German artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit — or new objectivity — movement, and between his large-scale mural projects and the works of the Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera. Up to a point, that's reason able enough, but the resemblances are superficial, and don't really get at what is individual and interesting about Spencer.

Personally, I think he was out of step with the art of his time, not because he was provincial and eccentric — though he was those things — but because he was one of those artists who only make sense retrospectively. That is, he had more in common with artists before and after his own time than he did with his contemporaries. He started out a bit like Samuel Palmer, and ended up more like Gilbert & George and Jeff Koons, and admittedly at times also Beryl Cook.

Odd comparisons, you might think, for the cosy Cookhamite (Spencer always put great stress on cosiness). Koons, of course, was married for a time to the Italian porn queen La Cicciolina, and made many works of the two of them engaged in various types of intercourse. G&G have been best known recently for images of themselves naked and surrounded by diverse sorts of bodily emission and fluid. But Spencer, it is clear from this exhibition, produced some very similar work.

Among the most striking items not previously widely seen are a full-scale nude drawing of himself from 1938-39, and a number of smaller drawings of himself and his mistress of the early Forties, Daphne Charlton, in playful amorous scenes, including a couple of them seated on a double privy, possibly of Spencer's own imagining. This is all extremely G&G/Koons territory, in its determined exposure and exploration of the artist's most intimate moments and equally determined presentation of the artist's naked self. The same is true of the better-known paintings of Spencer and Patricia Preece together, in particular the famous Leg Of Mutton Nude.

But there is more to the comparison with later 20th-century artists than a preoccupation with sex and the depiction of the artist in a starring role. He was he said, on the side of 'angels and dirt', by which he meant that he wanted to include everything connected with him in the same artistic world — cabbage leaves and the contents of dustbins, as in the painting called 'The Dustman (or the Lovers)', as well as religious narrative.

Spencer's extraordinary project for his Church House — or Church of Me (of which there is a excellent virtual reconstruction on view) — would, if realised, have mingled religious scenes in the nave and chancel, with chapels devoted to the women in his life; one containing the Preece nudes. It seems that the lavatory drawings were for paintings to go in the Church House conveniences.

That was a way of insisting that everything could, in religious language, be redeemed. And that was at the heart, it seems to me, of Spencer's obsession with the Resurrection — a subject he painted on a number of occasions. To Spencer, the Resurrection seems to mean that nothing would disappear into oblivion: all people, all moments would return. The object of his wonderful war paintings (mostly in the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, and hence not on show) was to 'save' the redeeming moments of happiness and goodness Spencer had experienced.

This is a doctrine not unlike Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (the idea if you liked life enough you would welcome the notion that everything would happen again and again and again). But it is not conventionally religious — asked by John Betjeman whether Spencer believed in bodily resurrection, he spluttered but did not answer. On the other hand, it is not unlike the determination of many late-20th-century artists to elevate the despised and neglected items of the world into the dignity of art (one suspects that A.J. Ayer wouldn't have got on with them either).

Koons seems to feel the same about kitsch. There is a strong though possibly accidental resemblance between the paintings Koons has been producing in recent years and the Spencer called 'Christmas' (1936) with its precise and loving depiction of crinkled paper and kitschy toys. 'The Garage' (1929) shows that he shared a fascination for car tyres with Robert Rauschenberg, another modernist snapperupper of unconsidered trifles. Many of Spencer's 'potboiler' landscapes are refreshed by his focus on some unpicturesque detail of reality — rusty garden railings, crazy paving, a fish tank.

The problem with Spencer's work, and it is a big problem, is that he did not find a satisfactory idiom for his later vision. The Preece nude and other pictures from that period are great paintings, but the caricatural style of much of the output from the mid-Thirties on — perhaps a distancing device, considering how intimate the material often was — just does not work. In the Fifties he was running down. But the later work is soft-pedalled in this excellent show, which should be deservedly successful.