Art: Breach of the Peace

In most matters of art, London’s progressive Tate Gallery and the conservative Royal Academy happily stick to their separate tracks. One subject on which both have been meeting head-on for some 50 years: how to spend the proceeds of the £105,000 bequest left by 19th Century Sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey (TIME, Jan. 10, 1949 et seq.). So long as the Royal Academy made all the selections, the progressives howled—and in recent years outspoken Tate Director John Rothenstein had been chuting most of the Chantrey purchases straight to the cellar.

Last fall, in a move toward a negotiated peace, the academicians agreed to let the Tate take a hand in the picking. The first purchase under the new system, a tasteful portrait by Augustus John, seemed to satisfy everybody. With the second, the conservatives set up a howl.

It turned out to be Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection, a large and rowdy panorama of an English country graveyard at. the last trump (TIME, May 8). Last week, oldtimers were flooding the London press with protests. Wrote a Daily Telegraph reader: “If the Chantrey trustees, impervious to public opinion, choose to exhibit these abnormal pictures, may I pray their hanging committee may hang beside them.”

Backing up the malcontents was no less a personage than Sunday Painter Winston Churchill, who had remarked after seeing the picture: “I don’t like it, and, furthermore, if that is the Resurrection, I can contemplate with considerable equanimity the prospect of eternal sleep.”

Tut, tut, said Tate Director Rothenstein: “I know there has been some opposition. But in spite of this, Resurrection does have a spiritual intensity and prodigal imaginative force, which in my opinion amply justify its acquisition.”

Despite his milk & water mildness, Director Rothenstein was not backing down. The negotiated peace had lasted approximately seven months.