Exhibitions
The Kunsthal Rotterdam presents an exhibition about Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), in cooperation with Tate Modern and the Stanley Spencer Foundation. Opens September 2011. Paul Gough was commissioned to write texts for a selection of paintings by Spencer and other British painters.
14. 1923 Stanley Spencer Camouflaged grenadier 1922 23 study Chapel Burghclere 51×37 Tate
Spencer came home from the war in 1919 a change, a different man. An imaginative painter, no longer an intuitive one. He was intent on creating an ambitious memorial scheme that would capture the intensity of his experiences during the war. For months in the 1920s he spent day after day in friends’ houses making page after page of drawings ‘as unhesitatingly as though he were writing a letter’, churning out ‘acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions.’ Having long pondered his ideas for a memorial scheme during his war service in Macedonia, Spencer quickly arrived at proposals for a finished design, complete with architectural features, lighting schemes, and detailed compositions for each part of a chapel interior. Drawing his inspiration from Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, the two painted side walls would have two tiers of canvases, a lower predella tier that conveyed his memories of the hospital – a panoply of scrubbing, bed-making, sorting laundry and washing giant bath tubs – and a series of eight arched panels, each one depicting an aspect of his war service starting with a convoy of wounded arriving at the hospital in Bristol, and including scenes of camp life, tending the wounded, and the mundane business of service life.
Although these compositions are busy with action and incident, none of them depict fighting, injury or death. They evince calmness, repose, even an air of sleepiness. Everywhere across the vast painted walls soldiers are unhurried, rested, engrossed in their own worlds, happily locked within the ‘elsewheres of their mind’.
Except that is in one of the arched panels, known as ‘Stand to’. In the preliminary drawing Spencer shows a platoon of soldiers emerging from their trench ‘dug-out’ to face not only the prospect of a new day, but the threat of enemy attack. At the front of the drawing a soldier, beautifully rendered in a subtle tonal wash of pen and ink is adorned in fern leaves. This was a particularly brave and widely admired sergeant by the name of Challoner whom Spencer had served under. In the clamorous danger of the outposts he was regarded as a guardian angel:
As one was lying flat on the bottom of the outpost, one had a feeling that this sergeant reclining on the parapet was like a kind of angel, a supernatural being. One did not see him; one daren’t look up. One knew and felt he was there.
The drawing became the basis for one of the finest panels in the entire chapel; the sergeant seems momentarily distracted, casting his eyes to the left towards the endwall as if suddenly becoming aware of the miraculous resurrection of the soldiers.
12. 1918 Paul Nash We are Making a New World 1918 71×91 Imperial War Museum CAT 22 PG
Before the war a painter of rather wistful south English landscapes, Paul Nash was radicalized by his experiences on the Western Front. Although he spent less than eight weeks on the front line as an officer in the Hampshire Regiment, Nash was changed forever as an artist. Appalled by the devastation wrought by industrialized warfare, he was equally astonished by nature’s unfailing ability to recover and rejuvenate in the grimmest of surroundings.
In a letter from the Front he wrote of walking through a wood on the battlefield, or at least what remained of it after the fighting, when it was just ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. Less than two months later, to his great surprise, this ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’. He described how: ‘the most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’
After a period of convalescence Nash was commissioned as an Official War Artist and staged several successful exhibitions which fused the absurdity of war with a newly discovered technique derived from his encounters with Nevinson and other British modernist painters. Gone were the vapid watercolours of limpid elms to be replaced with taut designs built around hard diagonal lines, acidic colours and somber tones.
Possibly the most acclaimed of the work he showed in London was the heavily-ironic We are Making a New World, a brazenly symbolic canvas developed from a drawing of a sunrise at Inverness Copse, a derelict woodland deep in the Ypres Salient. Dispensing with any reference to a particular place Nash seems to suggest that this bold, rather economic, design summarized his feelings about the war. The sun is white against a pale blue sky, and the undulating earth a porridge of ochre; the mass of cloud is a dull but virulent red, not unlike the colour of dried blood. What was he trying to communicate? Could he have been suggesting that the very ‘source of life has spilt its blood’ or that it may yet regenerate the waste which is so brilliantly illuminated by the rising sun? Sunrise and sunset, of course, were moments of heightened tension in the trenches of the Western Front, associated with the anxious minutes of ‘stand to’ when combatants peered into the greyness of No Man’s Land in readiness for a twilight assault on their lines. Any lingering Romantic or poetic allusions associated with the rising or the setting of the sun were soon dashed in the dreadful actualities of the trenches: a truth brilliantly expressed by Nash in a letter to his wife:
‘Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war, no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.’
13. 1919 Wyndham Lewis A Battery Shelled 1919 183×318 Imperial War Museum CAT 23 PG
With his magnetic personality, saturnine looks and fierce intelligence Lewis was always destined to lead. A self-proclaimed ‘crowd-master’ he radicalized British visual arts in the first decade of the twentieth century lambasting what he and his fellow Vorticists considered to be the indolent complacency of much of British cultural, social and political life. Strident and sarcastic, mocking and mendacious, Lewis savaged the nineteenth century and the legacy of the Victorians, cursing the ‘abysmal inexcusable middle class’, and scorning (for good measure) both the aristocracy and the proletariat. Onset of European war fragmented a nascent Vorticism distributing its angry (and talented) young men into the armed services. Lewis became an artillery officer and he served in the Ypres Salient for several dangerous months, before being commissioned as an official war artist. Like so many others, he was now a changed man:
‘The war was a sleep, deep and animal in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. …. The Geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. They were still as much present in my mind as ever, but submerged in the coloured vegetation, the flesh and blood, that is life… ‘War, and especially those miles of hideous desert known as “the Line” in Flanders and France, presented me with a subject- matter so consonant with the austerity of that “abstract” vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition.’
1919 Stanley Spencer Travoys arriving with wounded 1916 19 183 x 218.5 Imperial War Museum CAT 24
Having been bought up in Cookham all his life, having rarely spent a night away from the supportive warmth of his family home, at the age of twenty-six Spencer tore himself away from his beloved village to volunteer for active service in the First World War. Despite being keen to join his County infantry regiment, his mother insisted that he join the medical service and he trained as a medical orderly. With his younger brother, Gilbert, they learned the rudiments of first aid and were both posted to a former lunatic asylum turned military hospital in Bristol. Ten gruelling months amidst the rough camaraderie of the hospital deeply unsettled Spencer and in mid-1916 he left Bristol for active service in Macedonia. Before finally joining an infantry regiment, he served first with a Field Ambulance Unit on the malarial-ridden plains of that forgotten theatre of war. His memories of dragging the mule-drawn stretcher cases was recalled in this large canvas painted at the request of the national war museum, who had envisaged a painting of a religious service at the front, but were gifted instead with this striking composition, ‘Travoys Arriving with Wounded Arriving at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916’.
Seen from a high vantage point, a fan-shape of stretchers radiates from the interior of an improvised operating theatre, its harsh light casting complex shadows into a yard full of mules, drivers and orderlies. Misshapen bundles under dun-coloured blankets, the casualties lie inert waiting patiently their turn, while all around the hustle and bustle of the forecourt contrasts with the concentrated silence of the chapel-like operating room. Spencer later recalled the vivid impression of the place:
‘I was standing a little away from the old Greek church, which was used as a dressing station and operating theatre, and coming there were rows of travoys with wounded and limbers crammed full of wounded men. One would have thought that the scene was a sordid one, a terrible scene … but I felt there was a grandeur … all those wounded men were calm and at peace with everything so that pain seemed a small thing with them. I felt there was a spiritual ascendancy over everything.’
Echoing Bliblical images of the Nativity, Spencer remembered the yard as a scene not of horror but of redemption, a place of peace in the middle of the confusion and noise of battle, ‘The figures on the stretchers treated with the same veneration and awe as so many crucified Jesus Christs and not as conveying suffering but as conveying a happy atmosphere of peace’ Caught in a liminal state between peace and battle, between life and death, the patients belong to another world from those tending them. ‘In it, wrote Spencer, ‘but not of it.’ Travoys was painted after the war in a temporary studio in stables near the painter’s house in Cookham. Not only did the building offer more space and better light but the ‘noble names’ of the horses long since sent to the war still graced the stable walls, lending it a homely but rather melancholic air.
14. 1923 Stanley Spencer Camouflaged grenadier 1922 23 study Chapel Burghclere 51×37 Tate
Spencer came home from the war in 1919 a change, a different man. An imaginative painter, no longer an intuitive one. He was intent on creating an ambitious memorial scheme that would capture the intensity of his experiences during the war. For months in the 1920s he spent day after day in friends’ houses making page after page of drawings ‘as unhesitatingly as though he were writing a letter’, churning out ‘acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions.’ Having long pondered his ideas for a memorial scheme during his war service in Macedonia, Spencer quickly arrived at proposals for a finished design, complete with architectural features, lighting schemes, and detailed compositions for each part of a chapel interior. Drawing his inspiration from Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, the two painted side walls would have two tiers of canvases, a lower predella tier that conveyed his memories of the hospital – a panoply of scrubbing, bed-making, sorting laundry and washing giant bath tubs – and a series of eight arched panels, each one depicting an aspect of his war service starting with a convoy of wounded arriving at the hospital in Bristol, and including scenes of camp life, tending the wounded, and the mundane business of service life.
Although these compositions are busy with action and incident, none of them depict fighting, injury or death. They evince calmness, repose, even an air of sleepiness. Everywhere across the vast painted walls soldiers are unhurried, rested, engrossed in their own worlds, happily locked within the ‘elsewheres of their mind’.
Except that is in one of the arched panels, known as ‘Stand to’. In the preliminary drawing Spencer shows a platoon of soldiers emerging from their trench ‘dug-out’ to face not only the prospect of a new day, but the threat of enemy attack. At the front of the drawing a soldier, beautifully rendered in a subtle tonal wash of pen and ink is adorned in fern leaves. This was a particularly brave and widely admired sergeant by the name of Challoner whom Spencer had served under. In the clamorous danger of the outposts he was regarded as a guardian angel:
As one was lying flat on the bottom of the outpost, one had a feeling that this sergeant reclining on the parapet was like a kind of angel, a supernatural being. One did not see him; one daren’t look up. One knew and felt he was there.
The drawing became the basis for one of the finest panels in the entire chapel; the sergeant seems momentarily distracted, casting his eyes to the left towards the endwall as if suddenly becoming aware of the miraculous resurrection of the soldiers.
12. 1918 Paul Nash We are Making a New World 1918 71×91 Imperial War Museum CAT 22 PG
Before the war a painter of rather wistful south English landscapes, Paul Nash was radicalized by his experiences on the Western Front. Although he spent less than eight weeks on the front line as an officer in the Hampshire Regiment, Nash was changed forever as an artist. Appalled by the devastation wrought by industrialized warfare, he was equally astonished by nature’s unfailing ability to recover and rejuvenate in the grimmest of surroundings.
In a letter from the Front he wrote of walking through a wood on the battlefield, or at least what remained of it after the fighting, when it was just ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. Less than two months later, to his great surprise, this ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’. He described how: ‘the most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’
After a period of convalescence Nash was commissioned as an Official War Artist and staged several successful exhibitions which fused the absurdity of war with a newly discovered technique derived from his encounters with Nevinson and other British modernist painters. Gone were the vapid watercolours of limpid elms to be replaced with taut designs built around hard diagonal lines, acidic colours and somber tones.
Possibly the most acclaimed of the work he showed in London was the heavily-ironic We are Making a New World, a brazenly symbolic canvas developed from a drawing of a sunrise at Inverness Copse, a derelict woodland deep in the Ypres Salient. Dispensing with any reference to a particular place Nash seems to suggest that this bold, rather economic, design summarized his feelings about the war. The sun is white against a pale blue sky, and the undulating earth a porridge of ochre; the mass of cloud is a dull but virulent red, not unlike the colour of dried blood. What was he trying to communicate? Could he have been suggesting that the very ‘source of life has spilt its blood’ or that it may yet regenerate the waste which is so brilliantly illuminated by the rising sun? Sunrise and sunset, of course, were moments of heightened tension in the trenches of the Western Front, associated with the anxious minutes of ‘stand to’ when combatants peered into the greyness of No Man’s Land in readiness for a twilight assault on their lines. Any lingering Romantic or poetic allusions associated with the rising or the setting of the sun were soon dashed in the dreadful actualities of the trenches: a truth brilliantly expressed by Nash in a letter to his wife:
‘Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war, no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.’
13. 1919 Wyndham Lewis A Battery Shelled 1919 183×318 Imperial War Museum CAT 23 PG
With his magnetic personality, saturnine looks and fierce intelligence Lewis was always destined to lead. A self-proclaimed ‘crowd-master’ he radicalized British visual arts in the first decade of the twentieth century lambasting what he and his fellow Vorticists considered to be the indolent complacency of much of British cultural, social and political life. Strident and sarcastic, mocking and mendacious, Lewis savaged the nineteenth century and the legacy of the Victorians, cursing the ‘abysmal inexcusable middle class’, and scorning (for good measure) both the aristocracy and the proletariat. Onset of European war fragmented a nascent Vorticism distributing its angry (and talented) young men into the armed services. Lewis became an artillery officer and he served in the Ypres Salient for several dangerous months, before being commissioned as an official war artist. Like so many others, he was now a changed man:
‘The war was a sleep, deep and animal in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. …. The Geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. They were still as much present in my mind as ever, but submerged in the coloured vegetation, the flesh and blood, that is life… ‘War, and especially those miles of hideous desert known as “the Line” in Flanders and France, presented me with a subject- matter so consonant with the austerity of that “abstract” vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition.’
A Battery Shelled is the fullest expression of these new ideas. A huge canvas it depicts a battery position under enemy fire amidst geometrically-ruined buildings. Arranged around a semi-circular pit of gouged-up earth are dugouts, duckboards, piles of shells, and two guns heavily camouflaged with netting. In the centre of the painting, small groups of semi-mechanized figures go about their grim business with a curious syncopated gait, while overhead tubular columns of smoke billow across a steel-grey sky. Surveying the busy scene are several black-clad figures in soft caps, who present three aspects of the human form. One stands full-face looking out of the frame. A second in three-quarter view, his hands stuck deep in his pockets. The third is seen in profile, his pipe-stem balanced on his chin, a striking silhouette against the arcs of orange and light-grey that dance and jig across the picture surface. Their studied indifference, their utter disinterest in the events all round them, contrasts dramatically with the determined industriousness of the insect-like creatures gadding about in the pit below. There, the earth convulses in crests and waves of steely grey-blue ‘water’ rolling in and around the cipher-like gunners. Even the heavy guns appear to bob about precariously in the deep troughs of mud, while the triumvirate gaze out dispassionately as though from the bridge of a ship. At the time many observers thought this a dull picture, formulaic and lifeless, and there is something of its precise logic and measured language that recalled Ezra Pound’s admiration of the compressed and economic power of the machine: ‘its ability to perform its function with clean precision and without any emotionalism or fuss.’ For his part, Lewis felt the war denied him four years of artistic growth. It had also ended his avant-garde art movement, nipping Vorticism in the bud before it had a chance to flower, denying for decades a British dalliance with pure abstraction. Yet, he later concluded it had not been all bad. ‘In the long run’, he reflected, ‘the War helped my career but it was a long run all right’.
Having been bought up in Cookham all his life, having rarely spent a night away from the supportive warmth of his family home, at the age of twenty-six Spencer tore himself away from his beloved village to volunteer for active service in the First World War. Despite being keen to join his County infantry regiment, his mother insisted that he join the medical service and he trained as a medical orderly. With his younger brother, Gilbert, they learned the rudiments of first aid and were both posted to a former lunatic asylum turned military hospital in Bristol. Ten gruelling months amidst the rough camaraderie of the hospital deeply unsettled Spencer and in mid-1916 he left Bristol for active service in Macedonia. Before finally joining an infantry regiment, he served first with a Field Ambulance Unit on the malarial-ridden plains of that forgotten theatre of war. His memories of dragging the mule-drawn stretcher cases was recalled in this large canvas painted at the request of the national war museum, who had envisaged a painting of a religious service at the front, but were gifted instead with this striking composition, ‘Travoys Arriving with Wounded Arriving at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916’.
Seen from a high vantage point, a fan-shape of stretchers radiates from the interior of an improvised operating theatre, its harsh light casting complex shadows into a yard full of mules, drivers and orderlies. Misshapen bundles under dun-coloured blankets, the casualties lie inert waiting patiently their turn, while all around the hustle and bustle of the forecourt contrasts with the concentrated silence of the chapel-like operating room. Spencer later recalled the vivid impression of the place:
‘I was standing a little away from the old Greek church, which was used as a dressing station and operating theatre, and coming there were rows of travoys with wounded and limbers crammed full of wounded men. One would have thought that the scene was a sordid one, a terrible scene … but I felt there was a grandeur … all those wounded men were calm and at peace with everything so that pain seemed a small thing with them. I felt there was a spiritual ascendancy over everything.’
Echoing Bliblical images of the Nativity, Spencer remembered the yard as a scene not of horror but of redemption, a place of peace in the middle of the confusion and noise of battle, ‘The figures on the stretchers treated with the same veneration and awe as so many crucified Jesus Christs and not as conveying suffering but as conveying a happy atmosphere of peace’ Caught in a liminal state between peace and battle, between life and death, the patients belong to another world from those tending them. ‘In it, wrote Spencer, ‘but not of it.’ Travoys was painted after the war in a temporary studio in stables near the painter’s house in Cookham. Not only did the building offer more space and better light but the ‘noble names’ of the horses long since sent to the war still graced the stable walls, lending it a homely but rather melancholic air.
