Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’
Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life. People remember that he loved bread and jam and was obsessed with rubbish, that his sexual compulsions drove him to divorce the love of his life and marry a man-hating and gold-digging tease, and amid all this detail the tremendous seriousness of his work can be lost.
Undoubtedly Spencer made art out of his life, which accounts for some fairly strange nudes and odd allegorical pictures, but his paintings and drawings must be seen as art and not literature.
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