Art: Revelation in Cookham

“An academic, stylistic history of modern English art could be written without a mention of this artist,” intoned London’s Times last week, “but to omit him is to miss one of the most remarkable figures of the century.” The Manchester Guardian agreed: “The most original artist of time a mystic to whom nothing is commonplace.” The painter in question was Britain’s puckish, eccentric Stanley Spencer, 64, who was being honored last week with a retrospective of 83 oils at London’s Tate Gallery. The paintings represented a lifetime devoted to religious themes−all depicted in the comfortable everyday terms of barnyards, country lanes and the River Thames around Painter Spencer’s small native Berkshire village of Cookham (pop. 5,900) 27 miles west of London. Burning Bush. The son of a church organist Spencer got his training at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, served as a medical corpsman and infantry soldier in World War I before returning to Cookham. It was in Cookham that Spencer had his day of revelation: “Quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning, and this made everything holy. The instinct of Moses to take off his shoes when he saw the burning bush was very similar to my feelings. I saw many burning bushes in Cookham.” For Spencer, who patterned the Virgin May after his counsin, a milkmaid, it seems perfectly natural that angels in their visitations should call on Sarah Tubb, whom Spencer remembers vividly when “she knelt right down in the street at the time there was a thing called Halley’s comet.” On the day of the Resurrection, Spencer paints the whole Cookham churchyard opening up as the dead come forth. In one version Spencer portrays himself on judgment morn, leaning against a tombstone, his work apparently done.

Such treatment of religious themes, peopled with Cookham’s ham-handed menfolk and bosomy barmaids painted in flat, low-keyed colors, has kept Artist Spencer a storm center. Harrumphed Fellow Artist Sir Winston Churchill: “If that is the Resurrection. I can contemplate with considerable equanimity the prospect of eternal sleep.” But it has also brought Spencer fame, if not riches, including membership in the Royal Academy and the order of Commander of the British Empire.

Button for Perfection. The current Tate retrospective shows why. While earning a living by turning out popular landscapes and portraits, Spencer has devoted the past 22 years to decorating a “chapel in the air” whose dimensions are nothing less than Cookham itself, with the main street for the nave, the River Thames as “a side aisle.” Into it, Spencer fits his Pentecost, Cana and “couples” cycles, filling them out with Bruegelesque pictures of everyday life. Nothing is too mundane to leave out. Says Spencer: “All ordinary acts such as the sewing on of a button are religious things and a part of perfection.”

Latest work for Spencer’s proposed chapel is a series on Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. For one panel, Listening from Punts (see cut), Spencer has drawn on his boyhood memories of Edwardian regatta-goers who arrived for river-barge concerts. “From people listening to Bach,” says he, “it’s not such a long step to people listening to Christ. It’s almost the same, nearly there. So I decided to make it Christ preaching a sermon.” Spencer liked the idea so much that he plans to repeat the subject on the other side of the Thames as well. Neither Christ figure has yet been painted, but Spencer promises: “He’ll be having a good time. He’ll be better entertainment than the orchestra. He’ll be the most regattaish thing in the regatta.”