ART
Paintings and Drawings. By Stanley Spencer. Leicester Galleries.
A mitiss of Stanley Spencer's work, such as that now to be seen in the two inner rooms at the Leicester Galleries, tires an onlooker with its tireless thoughtfulness. He is the completest of " mental " painters alive, and since modern art in its more distorting, abstract, and super-realistic aspects is largely mental, he might be mistaken for the greatest of all modern painters. But good painting must be felt as well as thought. It is a product of the heart and the soul, and even of the bowels (if one can say so in these days without being called a Fascist) as well as of the mind. Stanley Spencer's later figure-compositions and landscapes are all coldly and calculatingly striking ; but they are very little felt, and because of this most of them are, in varying degrees, repellent. They are repellent not because of their grotesqueness (Modigliani is grotesque) or because of their cruelty (Lautrec is cruel) or because of their scorn (Daumier is scornful), but because of their lack of humility. The mind here conceives children in its own image and the eye is its midwife.
All this is tragic, because Mr. Spencer is not only a very accom- plished painter but has a natural spontaneous vision which, when he does not stifle it, makes him produce works of great beauty. His recent studies for the War Artists' Committee, of shipyard workers, have, in spite of their quaintness of shape and the habitual quaintness of attitude, an actuality that shows love, or at least respect. This is because they are reports of things seen and not the reports of a visionary. These are not in the present exhibition, nor are other works of the kind ; but among the earlier works here there are many that we are all the better for his having painted. Among them is a small oil called Studying the Plan for the Decora- tion of Burghclere Memorial Chapel (1919)—a vision of a passing moment's happening at a particular place that is vivid and real. This gift for fixing the events of a moment is an important side of him, but he misuses it. He can make people in groups look as if they have been transfixed with pins like gawky insects, which is how they can look in a film-still ; and it is en interesting thing to do. But when the trick—the artist acting visionary—is repeated over and over again with different groups it is tiresome. If it were the product of natural vision it would never become tiresome. Creature of the mind as it is, it is mere gymnastics. In the recent Beatitudes of Love the pace is hotter but the game no more interesting.
The later landscapes are " easier," but not richer. A fence parades itself before a farmyard, snow seems to oxydise an apple tree, a village in the Stroud valley swings into sharp focus ; but even when there is sunshine and leaves hang on the trees or clematis displays itself, the scenes look cold and lonely. When the friendly features of Cookham appear—the cast-iron bridge with its trefoils, the river, the swans, the sense that Maidenhead and the Great Western Railway are not far away—there is a welcome warmness. But they and their kind are not there often enough. JOHN PIPER.
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