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.
It becomes more and more difficult to organise a top-quality Bacon exhibition as demand for his work around the world increases. (This display, for instance, is in direct competition with a general Bacon retrospective at Dusseldorf.) Peppiatt must be congratulated for achieving a remarkable selection which effectively balances the necessary well-known images with unfamiliar paintings. Bacon himself established the canonical picture selection with his overseeing of the 1985 Tate retrospective. Intriguingly, Peppiatt now offers us alternatives. Thus in the first room of this elegant installation are such unusual works as ‘Figure with Monkey’ and ‘Elephant Fording a River’, both from private collections, animal paintings with a difference which reinforce better-known images such as ‘Man with Dog’, borrowed from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Here, too, is the memorably snout-faced ‘Homage to van Gogh’ from Sweden. Man and beast are discovered bellowing in the same stall.
In the second room is ‘Study for a Portrait III (after Life Mask of William Blake)’ and the Spanish-looking ‘Head III’, both private loans, and ‘Head in Grey’, from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In these pictures we see the compelling mixture of assurance and doubt which characterises Bacon’s work of this period, the hesitation and the unfettered imaginative power — both of which stem from being self-taught. Are these figures victims of unspeakable horror? Their distortions are often taken to imply this. Certainly Bacon was intent on confronting the viewer of his paintings with extremes of emotion, but so battle-scarred and weary with atrocity are we in the early 21st century that some insulation against the electricity of his shock tactics is inevitable. Instead, I found myself concentrating on the beauties of the paintwork, on the gleaming yellow-gold swerve in ‘Screaming Man’ of 1952 in the third room, rather than on the fact that he was screaming; or on the sheer oddness of the railway image in ‘End of the Line’ (1953).
As would be expected, the 13 Bacon paintings from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, gifted to the University of East Anglia in the 1970s, form the nucleus of this exhibition. The Sainsburys met Bacon in 1955, and became friends, patrons and stalwart supporters. Bacon began eight portraits of Lisa Sainsbury, of which five were destroyed in bouts of the artist’s typically savage self-criticism — an excellent habit he later relaxed. The Sainsburys did manage to salvage one canvas from the razor: ‘Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII)’. Bacon started slashing it up in front of them, but they begged to be allowed to take it home, and it was duly restored. Most of the Sainsbury pictures are in the lower gallery downstairs, along with a 1984 triptych which looks very out of place. This relatively small exhibition, which will travel to Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin (29 January to 15 April 2007), and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (5 May to 30 July 2007), has many wonderful things in it, not least the ‘Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa’ (1955), which contains an unexpected echo of Stanley Spencer’s early self-portrait of 1914 in the Tate.
That painting isn’t in the new exhibition of Spencer’s work at Reading Museum, but two other self-portraits are: one from 1923, of a similarly dark-haired young man, and a much later one from 1949, of the now grey Stanley looking down by gaslight. They’re from the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, which is closed until July 2007 for refurbishment. Never before has the whole of this substantial collection been on show, and it makes fine viewing. It’s also a very good introduction to Spencer’s gifts and preoccupations, and indicates his primarily linear methods of picture construction, including as it does the vast unfinished but largely drawn-in ‘Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta’ (1953–9).
Among the choice pictures here are ‘Neighbours’ (1936), in which the arms of the greeting women across their hedge are wittily echoed in the adjacent tree branch (much like the men’s arms and swans’ necks in the famous ‘Swan Upping’ painting); any of the highly finished drawings, whether portraits or compositions; the hunchbacked ‘Scarecrow, Cookham’ (1934); the magnificent ‘Last Supper’ of 1920, with legs and arms setting up powerful rhythms across the picture; and the wonderfully strange ‘Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors’. The group of six landscapes on the end wall are a joyous bonus, particularly the luminous painting of horse chestnuts and wisteria.
The Bacon industry is in full swing. On the heels of his successful 2005 study of the master, Martin Harrison has undertaken the immense task of rationalising the Bacon oeuvre into a catalogue raisonné. Meanwhile to accompany UEA’s excellent show Yale has published a substantial and rather beautiful volume Francis Bacon in the 1950s by Michael Peppiatt, which doubles as a catalogue, appearing simultaneously in hardback and paperback. (Priced £29.99 and £25 respectively.) By comparison, Spencer has not been the object of so much attention, since the last major exhibition (at the Tate in 2001) and the publication of his letters and writings. (There is, however, a new book about the chapel Spencer decorated, called Journey to Burghclere by Paul Gough, published by Sansom at £24.95, but I’ve yet to read it.) Spencer’s work does not command the same sort of financial clout as Bacon’s, nor the aura of chic. It has become fashionable to wallow in the steely despairing ambience of screaming popes and self-destructive businessmen. Bacon still titillates the jaded palates of the sensation-surfeited in a way that the fundamentally innocent vision of Spencer cannot hope to achieve. Of course, this is a tribute to the particular qualities of both artists, and makes the work of both essential viewing.
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