"I am on the side of angels and dirt" - Stanley Spencer art exhibition!

Stanley Spencer - The Lovers (The Dustman)

A major survey exhibition of one of Britain’s best loved painters, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), is currently on show at The Hepworth Wakefield from Sat 25 June - Wed 5 October. Presented during the 125th anniversary of Spencer’s birth, the exhibition brings together over 70 works spanning his entire career, including rarely-seen self-portraits and extracts from his diaries and writings offering a unique insight into his life and work.

The exhibition takes its title from Spencer’s proclamation “I am on the side of the angels and dirt”, and will bring together self-portraits, landscapes, portraits and paintings – some of which, may need an “over-18 only” warning – created for his unrealised dream of the Church House that would illuminate his own singular spiritual beliefs, including chapels celebrating all the women in his life.

The arrangement of the paintings allows visitors to view bodies of work that he created throughout his life as a whole, such as his landscape paintings, including views of his beloved hometown of Cookham, and his series of portraits of people close to him, including a number of depictions of his second wife, Patricia Preece. The exhibition will also examine the lifelong influence that early Italian Renaissance paintings by such artists as Botticelli, Fra Angelico and Giotto had on Spencer’s work, with a significant loan from the National Gallery, London.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

 Stanley Spencer fans and collectors include the late David Bowie, who narrated the BBC Omnibus Special about the painter in 2001. Spencer was among Bowie’s favourite British artists. Adam Ant (born Stuart Goddard) spent summer holidays in Cookham and grew up being inspired by the painter, who he calls his "favourite artist of all time"; Andrew Lloyd Webber, who owns several works by Spencer and considers both Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon as two of the greatest British painters of the twentieth century as well as British sculptor Anthony Gormley, broadcaster Jon Snow and art historian James Fox, who recently became President of the Friends of Stanley Spencer Gallery.

The Art of Stanley Spencer.

ONE of the better things to have been shown on TV recently, was the BBC Four programme, 'British Masters' introduced by the art historian James Fox.

Just before and after the First World War, a radical generation of painters determined to eject Victorian sentimentality and nostalgia from their art and pioneered a new style of painting that would capture and make sense of the modern experience.

Drawing upon the work of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert, Wyndham Lewis and others, Fox explores why, during the 20th century, British painters were often dismissed for being old-fashioned. He reveals how these artists carefully reconciled tradition and modernity, providing a unique creative tension that now makes the period seem so exciting.

Fox argues that British painting from 1910 to 1975 was an extraordinary flowering of genius that ranked alongside the Golden Ages of Renaissance Italy and Impressionist France.

"Walter Sickert shocked the public by making the low-lives of Camden Town and a brutal murder the subject of his gaze. Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg broke with centuries of realist tradition, reducing humanity to cold geometric forms. But as the country descended into war, three painters - Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer - reconciled what was best of the avant-garde with Britain's rich painterly tradition to create powerful images of war that would speak to us all."

For me, what was of great interest, was the art of Stanley Spencer and in particular, his murals at Sandham Memorial Chapel. Watch the video and see for yourself.