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Room 1 I Room
2 I Room 3 I Room 4 I Room
5 I Room 6
Room 4: Those Couple Things
Contemplation,
circa 1909
Lent by the Stanley Spencer Gallery. © The Estate
of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved DACS
2001
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'It would be better and truer to say "Spencer
likes degenerate and deformed-looking people" than
to impute me with sniggering and laughing derisively…These
people, every one of them, are the beloved of my imaginings.'
In the winter of 1937, with both his marriages now
collapsed, Spencer gave himself up to a prolonged meditation
and fantasy on the theme of 'husbands and wives'. The
figures in Spencer's most intimate paintings, The
Beatitudes of Love (nos 62 - 66), are conceived
as grotesque and comic characters. These 'ill-favoured'
figures come as a dramatic surprise. Indeed, the couple
in Consciousness 1938 (no.64) seem so wilfully
monstrous that one can hardly bear to look at them.
The Beatitudes are given a prominent position
here because they testify to one of Spencer's most profound
insights.
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Figures so hideous as these have usually been confined to
satire, as with the repulsive lovers painted by the German
artist Otto Dix in the 1920s. Spencer himself used the word
'degenerate' of his Beatitude figures - a very loaded term
in 1938, at the height of the Nazi campaign against so-called
'Degenerate Art' in Germany. Far from being satirical images,
however, Spencer's Beatitudes propose that human love,
even of the highest and most transcendent kind, is best articulated
not through beauty, but through the grotesque. This room also
contains a selection of Spencer's drawings of the 1940s.
In 1950 the painter Sir Alfred Munnings came across some of
the paintings and drawings of the 'couple' period and initiated
a police prosecution against Spencer for obscenity. On 4 October,
the Daily Express reported that the unnamed owner had
agreed to destroy these 'saucy' pictures and, a little later,
that he had 'put his foot' through them. These lost works
probably include at least one of the Beatitudes. As
a result of this intimidating attack, Spencer is known to
have hidden the Double Nude Portrait (no.58) under
his bed and to have removed the two lavatory drawings (nos
72 and 73) from his scrapbooks. It may also account for the
fact that Spencer did not continue to explore this vein of
sexual radicalism in his final decade.
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