ARTS
A great English experience
P.J. Kavanagh on the little-known Stanley Spencer chapel in Hampshire S tanley Spencer, 24 years old, five foot two, joined the Army in 1915 as a medical orderly in Bristol, then went to Macedonia, where he transferred to the infantry and saw, as the saying is, 'active service' in the trenches. In 1918 his friends in London had him nominated as an Official War Artist, but he only had time to make a few sketch- es (lost during the final campaign) before he was invalided home with malaria.
Like most men returned from that war his experiences haunted him and by 1919 he had painted his `Travoys with Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia', their stretchers, drawn by mules, arranged in a beautiful fan-shape across the canvas. From the beginning the vision was redemptive: 'I felt there was a grandeur ... the figures on the stretchers treated with the same veneration and awe as so many Jesus Christs and not as convey- ing suffering but conveying a happy atmo- sphere of peace.' By 1923 his friend Henry Lamb is describing how 'Stanley sits at a table all day evolving acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions'. At this point there befell Spencer the most extraordinary piece of luck.
Mr and Mrs J.L. Behrend visited the two painters, Lamb and Spencer, and saw these `acres of compositions'. Mrs Behrend's brother, Henry Sandham, had died as a result of that Macedonian campaign and, more or less there and then, they decided to commission Spencer to decorate a memorial chapel to Sandham. What is more, he could specify the dimensions of the building himself. He decided on those of the Arena Chapel at Padua and cheer- fully exclaimed, 'What ho, Giotto!'
`These paintings by Stanley Spencer and this Oratory are the fulfilment of a design which he con- ceived whilst on active service 1914-1918.' , He had those words set in the chapel wall himself and they make clear his inten- tion — autobiography, not rhetoric; an acknowl- edgment of pain, of course, but in the context of a final release from it into joy, expressed by means of (his own phrase) 'a mixture of real and spiritual fact'.
Facts were his inspiration. The first can- vas he painted — he tried fresco, but it didn't work — was of a shell-shocked patient lying almost horizontal to scrub a corridor in the Bristol hospital, which was also a lunatic asylum. Spencer practised with soap and water on his studio floor; there exists a study called 'Soapsuds'. For another panel in the Chapel, 'Ablutions', he washed his own hair to check the exact appearance of shampoo foam, and, as for the sponge, 'I sat there for half an hour, trying to think what a sponge looked like, but it was no good. I had to go home and get mine.'
It was a period of great confidence. His brother Gilbert says that Spencer nudged a visitor, 'Only Titian could have done that', and wonders if he was pointing to the sol- dier in the background of 'Ablutions', in the act of pulling on his braces: 'it is so admirably timed to the purpose of the design'. When the Chapel was completed, scaffolding was put up so that Spencer could paint on the spot. People came in to watch, mystified. His brother again: 'When- ever there was any hostility to his pictures Bedmaking, 1932, by Stanley Spencer, in Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere he would grease down the ladder expertly and turn on the radiators. He told me that when people grumbled, he knew they were cold.'
A soldier 'in the act of': everyone in every panel is absorbed in some ordinary task, usually domestic. All are self-forget- ful, scrubbing, bed-making, frying bacon, the tasks of living presented as sacramen- tal. There is no violence, no need for it, there is not even a weapon, unless you count the bayonet a Spencer-like figure is using to pick up camp litter. The figures themselves are rounded, burly; they are individuated but, with no display of por- trait-personality to distract us, are 'a mix- ture of real and spiritual fact'. They are humanity, us, in the outrageous circum- stance of a war it would be banal and unnecessary to depict.
Everything leads to the huge 'Resurrec- tion of the Soldiers' which occupies the whole east wall and took a year to paint. The figures at the bottom,. above the altar, are almost life-size and emerge from their graves as though from sleep, recognising each other, shaking hands, their grave- crosses tossed higgledy-piggledy around them. The composition leads upwards to a small and nonchalant Christ, to whom the soldiers are handing in their crosses like tickets of admission. But the centre of the wall (where Christ might be expected) is dominated by an extraordinary design, both domestic and mysterious. A muleteer lolls between the rounded haunches of two white mules, as though on a vast and com- forting sofa. It is a memory of the sensation of joining his parents in their bed when he was a child. The mules' necks are craned back, round, to look at the nearly invisible Christ. Everything is being resurrected and tenderly recognised: tortoises, a dog, embraced by a dazed soldier, licks his face, there is even — perhaps in atonement for the bacon-frying scene what looks like a small resuscitated pig. It is a staggering work.
Next to it, on the south wall, is a smaller companion piece `Reveille', which in its own way is equally astonishing. Men are clumsily dressing under mosquito nets, enmeshed, while others, free of encumbrances, peer in, evidently bring- ing them good news. Spencer would never talk of his symbolism, preferring, according to his brother, 'winks, asides, smiles, ges- tures and points ... His whole concentra- tion now would be centred on describing the incident and what a lovely thing it was to paint.' In another picture on the south wall, 'Filling Water-Bottles', solid soldiers are turned into flying angels. Spencer is careful to explain: 'The peculiar wing-like looking things coming from their shoulders are army macintoshes, which, being only attached at the back of the collar, naturally slide off the backs of the men ... and droop downwards.' One of the soldiers has his arm affectionately buried in the mane of a drinking piebald mule. How Spencer loved the Macedonian mules.
He was inspired. If this chapel was in France, painted by a Frenchman of the period, we would be falling over ourselves to track it down and see it.
Burghclere is still a charming, quiet vil- lage, with a good pub almost opposite the Chapel. Unfortunately Spencer didn't like pubs. When he spotted his brother inside one he angrily accused him of being 'a bloody dart-thrower'. Pity, but, as Joe E. Brown remarked in Some Like It Hot, `Nobody's perfect.'
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