Heaven and hell

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) and Francis Bacon (1909–92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements may be said to embody diametric opposites — the heaven on earth of Spencer’s beloved Cookham, and the ‘hell is others’ Grand Guignol of Bacon. Distinguished by a taste for physical deformity and duress, Bacon’s art is obsessed with brute facts. Spencer — who memorably wrote in his notebooks: ‘If I am called upon to worship…then I will begin with the lavatory seat’ — had an equally earthy approach to the human animal, but saw him as capable of redemption. An emphatically religious man — if rather broad in his personal interpretation of Christianity — Spencer sought ‘redemption from ugliness, meaninglessness’ through his art. If Bacon greeted the world with ‘exhilarated despair’, Spencer was perhaps more optimistic. Certainly his art is.