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. In their different ways both artists revitalised the realist tradition and offered fresh ways of seeing the world.

The writer and curator Michael Peppiatt, doyen of Bacon studies, is responsible for the latest focus on the master of the macabre, and has settled upon the 1950s as quintessential to Bacon’s art: ‘the most fertile single decade of his career’ in which he ‘located his great themes’. Peppiatt the biographer (author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 1996) describes it as ‘the period when he was at his wildest and most tormented’, when the artist was suffering ‘the confusion of extreme pleasure and extreme pain’. Art, as it has so often done before, offered catharsis. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble, but it can give rise to powerful artistic expression, and in this case it undoubtedly did. The Norwich exhibition demonstrates that.