The galleries: Portrait of a visionary

By T.J. McNAMARA

The wonderful exhibition of paintings by Stanley Spencer at the Auckland Art Gallery is dominated by two superb self-portraits which you encounter as you go in.

In youth and old age the artist gazes unblinkingly, his eyes fixed on a vision. The unforgettable early portrait, one of the greatest self-portraits in European art, is young and innocent, the second, old and lined, but in both the eyes are fixed with an intense stare on the world and beyond to Paradise. Milton's epic poem Paradise Regained might well provide the title for the show.

It has been assembled by the Auckland Art Gallery in conjunction with the Dunedin Gallery. It is a fairly small exhibition but there are enough paintings to illuminate almost every aspect of Spencer's work as one of the greatest English painters of last century.

For Spencer, born in 1891, as for many others, the watershed in the development of his work was the Great War of 1914-18. Spencer served in that war and when he returned he regarded every part of life as a gift from God to be treasured.

His life was focused on the village of Cookham beside the river Thames. He came from a family where the Bible was read every day and as a boy he saw the happenings of the Bible as taking place in Cookham. The innocence of this child-like vision never left him and he used the places and people of Cookham in his own eccentric way. The most famous of his works are paintings of the Resurrection where he sees the people of the village coming to life again. None are condemned to Hell. All rise from their graves questioningly and quizzically.

The Parents Resurrecting of 1933 is a fine example in this show. The people look disturbingly odd and there are two reasons for this. The first is truth, for people are odd when you see them with fresh eyes, and the second is that Spencer gave them heavy, stylised forms to relate them to the monumental figures that appear in the works of painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca. They are also crowded with detail. He sought the eternal in the particular.

Giotto was his special favourite and the earliest painting in the show is about the father of Mary, Joachim, who childless and ageing, was exiled among shepherds until, miracle of miracles, his wife had a child who became mother of the Redeemer who allowed us all into Paradise.

Of course, it is set in a farmyard near Cookham. Similarly, Giotto told the story of Joachim on the top level of his famous Arena Chapel in Padua in 1305. But Spencer is a modern and there is more than a touch of Gauguin in his work.

Spencer's Paradise was largely founded on sexual love and, endearingly, he shows sexual desire in the form of the oddest of people, notably here in The Office Boy and His Wife - and their broom and shovel.

All was not entirely well in Paradise.

We are fortunate that one of Spencer's most famous paintings is here on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Spencer entered into a curious second marriage driven by sexual desire. His second wife was something less than heavenly. In the fascinating Self-portrait with Patricia Preece the artist kneels and contemplates the rawly naked body of Patricia. We can sense both the desire on his part and the enormous tension between them. Spencer's neck is wrenched by the conflict of emotions.

The accepted word on Spencer's painting is that his manner is very dry, but in this work there is virtuoso handling of paint, not the least in the pearly lustre of Patricia's left breast and the stretch marks on the right, seen with the eye of absolute truth.

Further, the draughtsmanship, as everywhere, is faultless and the colour intricate and subtle. Spencer is perfect in suggesting the bone in the hip or the jut of a bum and makes them an essential part of the overall composition.

The quibble about dry, painting-by-numbers handling of paint may have more point in the landscapes that critics, as well as Spencer himself, tended to be patronising about. Yet he had wonderful equivalents for foliage and when he paints Garden View, Cookham Dene everything is full of energy and growth patterns.

Milton's Paradise Regained is about Christ's 40 days in the desert where he meditated on his mission. Spencer's monumental forms are seen in his impressive Christ in the Wilderness series which comes to us almost complete from the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

His Christ is a big lump of a man bristling with energy but it is energy in repose and meditation as He views His creation - blood-stained predatory birds as well as pretty, domestic birds - or rises like a giant flower from his rocky resting place. The shapes of his rough gown are as heavy as in a work of Michelangelo.

The exhibition is accompanied by a modest catalogue unlike the pretentious doorstop volumes that are a feature of lesser exhibitions overseas. There are two first-class introductory essays by Mary Kisler and Justin Paton, the joint curators of the exhibition.

Spencer is often compared to the great but equally idiosyncratic poet/artist William Blake, another English visionary eccentric. Blake proclaimed in the last line of his philosophic work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Everything that lives is Holy" and Spencer convincingly conveys the same message. Go, look and wonder.