This page attempts to relate Stanley's vision to contemporary movements in the forms of literature, music and art that became classified as Modernism. In his youth the impact of nineteenth-century scientific discovery was changing ways of thinking. In particular, the developing interest in psychology promoted the notion that everything that catches our attention - everything which comes to us as a stimulus, whether it is the sight of a person or object, a thought that strikes us, an idea we encounter, or a sensation we undergo - becomes part of our experience.
In art, it became an essential requirement of a Modernist work that it be designed to make use of the artist's overall experience rather than to record any specific depiction of an event, emotion or experience, however strikingly presented. It was intended to reach towards a classic universality we can all subscribe to. The term was first applied in art to the architectural and patterned styles initiated in France by Cezanne and Matisse amid considerable nineteenth-century hostility. Some thirty years was to pass before the movement was felt in Edwardian England and it began to challenge the Romantic art so admired by the Victorians.
Stanley, meeting up again with Slade friends after the Great War, was for a while tempted to test their advocacy of one of the new styles, that of Cubism/Vorticism - and to good effect, as witness his The Paralytic of 1920 - but he soon failed to find in it the universality he needed. To achieve such universality, he needed a more fulfilling approach, one which would sublimate his experience through his art.
Others at the time felt the same need. In literature a 'stream of consciousness' movement developed, with James Joyce using the paradigm of the Odyssey for his Ulysses, Proust reaching into social experience for his A la recherche du temps perdu, Ezra Pound into his classical background for his Cantos, or T S Eliot for his then-startling The Waste Land and Four Quartets.
There is no evidence that Stanley was in any way influenced by - or even read - the new writers of his day, or that his visionary art was intended to be literary in any meaningful way. But there is strong evidence that the more intellectual of his friends - Desmond Chute and Jas Wood, for example - were keenly aware of the new trends and did their best to explain them to him. In his writings and letters, it is clear that he grasped the essentials, if not always the detail. Either there was something in the air then, or, more probably, the scientific discoveries of the late Victorian period, and especially the developments in psychology (to which the young Stanley was being introduced through his brother Sydney's studies at Oxford) were making strong impact on creative minds and opening up new sources for construction and fresh ways of expression.
Perhaps one way of perceiving these new trends is to ask ourselves how we cope with the multitudinous daily stimuli of the senses to which we are subjected. Our instinctive reactions to most of them are quickly forgotten. But there are those which produce sensations or feelings or emotions which linger and occupy our attention to the extent that we feel we must try to make conscious sense of them. We do this instinctively by first categorising them.
The process of categorisation involves deciding the characteristics of a stimulus by defining its boundaries. Its boundaries map its perceived form so that it becomes an entity (a 'shape' as Stanley called it) in our minds. In sympathy with our fellows we allocate it an identity, give it a name, in basic terms a 'dog', say, or a 'cat', even though we are aware that every dog or cat is different from every other. The process is not restricted to perceived objects. It applies also to ideas or sensations or emotions. In effect we use the scientific method of dividing the world into recognisable constituent parts and identifying them in their differences.
But such categorisation has an obverse aspect. As our stock of entities accumulates, it becomes clear that at deeper levels differences can fade and similarities substitute. Cats and dogs, for example, have different categories as animals but share similar characteristics when classified as mammals. DNA reveals that the humanity we once thought to be so unique in fact links us with many less-advanced forms of life. The initial boundaries by which we first delimit our entities have to be expanded and redefined, and these wider boundaries given new categories. Each new entity is revealed as a stage in our expanding knowledge. They seem to advance us towards a conviction - as they certainly did Stanley - that we are in the grip of a compulsion which is impelling us towards some dimly-glimped totality.
The accuracy with which we develop our knowledge of these wider boundaries is the arbiter of what we call 'truth'. Get the new boundaries wrong and ultimately we get our world wrong.
If an entity can be defined as a unified and bounded amalgam - a mass or a quantum even? - of interacting and inter-relevant 'smaller' entities - its 'detail' - then the natural way of perceiving it is through the physical senses we possess. The result appears to us as 'reality'. Our experience of the entity will survive in our consciousness until displaced by the next incoming experience. Then it will sink into our memory. There it will remain until retrieved and reconstituted in our consciousness as required.
However, for most of us, a memorised experience cannot be reconstituted in its original exactitude because, as in dreams, it will have become mixed up with other experiences and memories. The reconstituted memory becomes a tangle of 'associations' or in Stanley's term, 'memory-feelings'. To retrieve the 'truth' of the originating reality we need to construct a mental model of it, discarding many of the accreted associations but retaining those which strike us as pertinent. An artist will make his re-assembly through intuitive processes of simplification, modification and where necessary distortion. In other words, he prefers the use of inventive imagination to attempts at reasoned logic.
When the artist feels that his reconstitution has created an apt model, he will be persuaded he has correctly recaptured the essence of the original experience, even though the result, if a painting, may not always look very like the originating 'reality'.
The procedure forms the art we have come to expect of the great names we admire and respect. But in Stanley's case there appears to be a flaw. It has been argued throughout this website that Stanley did not seem to possess the freely inventive imagination used by other artists, or at least did not appear to use it in his art. Why not, we ask?
The simplest answer is that there was an inborn exactitude in Stanley's nature which made him distrust what he saw as the indiscipline of free inventive imagination. It shows up, for example, in his startling precision in depicting detail. Throughout his life he made splendid use of the facility in painting his highly-observed landscapes and portraits. But it did little when he wished to reconstitute a memorised scene into visionary concept, for he found it difficult to prevent himself anchoring its detail in such photographic accuracy that it overrode recourse to imaginative invention.
The resulting pinpoint detail in Stanley's visionary pictures is sometimes promoted as a limitation, a drive towards factual truth rather than pictorial inventiveness. But his contrary view was that it was essential if he were to validly define the initial settings of a visionary picture. It gave him the start-line from which he could bring his feelings into play to reach vision. If he were to abandon precision of detail in the interests of free invention he might get his initial premise wrong. His visionary reconstruction would be invalid and he would have wasted his time.
The mechanism by which Stanley gave his pictures their 'vision' was by reproducing in them the 'feeling' element in his memory-feelings. But his problem was that the strong emotions to which he was by nature subject were amorphous and difficult to make visual. He found himself unable or unwilling to subdue sensations springing from an innate sensitivity to feeling as vivid to him as his visual percepts were precise. Yet somehow they had to be given form or 'shape' on the canvas.
To achieve this, he adopted a practice of bringing up from his subconscious (and at times from his deep unconscious) memories which provided feelings for him equivalent to those he was currently depicting. The fact that they mostly happened to form themselves into the shapes of human figures often derived from contacts with people who had raised such emotions for him in the past. His shapes - his figures - were recognisable as the people he had known but they were not intended to represent them in their actuality. They were proxies used as representative of the emotions he was now expressing and so could be modified or even distorted where necessary to that end.
Inevitably the result was that Stanley became convinced that the only trustworthy source for such imagery was his own experience. He combined precision of detail with sensitivity of feeling in the only direction he felt was valid - in recreating highly-personal and self-referential imagery, and in expressing it where necessary with a candour that was too easily misinterpreted as a lack of sophistication.
The impression of unworldliness sometimes ascribed to Stanley derived from a curiosity about the world and all things in it which was alsmost childlike in its intensity. It intrigued - and sometimes amused - many of those who crossed his path. But his strong sense of curiosity was tempered by an even deeper instinct to formalise the resulting discoveries into a 'philosophical'or metaphysical framework which connected them to provide the overall life-meaning which was the justification of his art. This disciplined search on his part for 'universality' through art was not always appreciated by contemporaries in spite of his constant efforts to explain. But he was far from being the 'innocent' he was often thought to be.
The imagination traditionally used by artists is intended to take them - and us - 'beyond' their subject, so that we become aware of a 'spiritual' or 'universal' element in their work. Viewers are moved by it. But when viewers first come across one of Stanley's visionary paintings, they tend to exclaim, 'fascinating, but where do we find the universality in the painting Stanley claims when so eloquently describing it?'
It is a valid question. The answer is that Stanley's 'universal' was in fact in his picture, but in a form unfamiliar to the viewer. It was in his counterpoint imagery.
Counterpoint in Stanley's usage was an extension of the counterbalance of form, colour, tone and so forth which is such a necessary component in all worthwhile visual composition. Stanley constructed his counterpoints by linking the imaged shapes of two opposing or at least contrasting sets of feelings across a physical or emotional 'barrier' he sets between them, so that where they are seen to link they harmonise and create a new, third, feeling, a unity - his 'two puddles overflowing into one'.
This unity, this third or master feeling, usually demands empathetic understanding from the viewer, and may not immediately be apparent. But when it does, the painting will come alive and take whatever meaning the viewer's own responses decree. The visualisation initially seen as specific to Stanley's experience will have become de-personalised and will have taken on a mantle of universality. A metamorphosis will have occurred. A Stanley-epiphany will have been made manifest.
These longed-for unities, these counterpoint-metamorphoses, which Stanley so vividly described in trying to explain his visionary paintings, were the mysterious ecstasies which raised him into new 'thought-worlds', his 'up-in-heaven'.
Moreover, each of Stanley's counterpoint-metamorphoses can be seen as a process in time. It embraced a 'before' and an 'after'. It expressed feeling in motion. This is what Stanley's contemporary Isaac Rosenberg implied when he perceptively said that Stanley's pictures were 'everlasting', having no 'beginning and no end'. Each counterpoint represented a concept, a comprehension, an enlightenment. It existed in Stanley's mind as a permanent entity - 'eternal' - and can hopefully attach to ours. It was feeling justified.
Not only were Stanley's shapes so assembled on the canvas that at the climax of the painting they provided the required counterpoint or comparison or contrast, but even more significantly they were designed to extol the emotional or dramatic or cathartic or reclamatory or revelatory or even redemptive qualities inherent in the composition. These are the effects which give his depictions such powerful overtones.
Stanley's quest for valid unities - and maybe ultimately a totality of unity (God? his Church-House or Last Day?) - became the foundation of his art. The motivation was that absorption of himself into everything in his surroundings, material or human, which attracted him, and which he called 'Love'. New entities always intrigued him even if at first he did not fully understand them. But far more fascinating to him was the realization that he had within him a power to make them comprehensible to himself through his art. They stimulated contemplation, which ordered the selection of images from his memory and transfigured them into meaningful shapes. Then came composition, the manifestation of a new unity through the organisation of its shapes on the canvas. The result was a planned construct, as classically formal in Stanley's stringent procedure as any architect's design in stone or glass or concrete.
The procedure raises, of course, the crucial question as to which of the two 'truths' - that of the initial 'reality' or that of the reconstituted version - is the true 'truth'. Or is one of the 'truths', say the reconstituted 'truth', of a higher order than the other? Debate about the question - the age-old source of conflict between science and religion, between the natural versus the supernatural, the physical and the metaphysical - has raged since the ascent of homo sapiens. It deeply influenced thinking in Stanley's day, and shows no signs of resolution as yet.
It is not difficult from Stanley's writings or from his visionary paintings to appreciate his joy when he felt he had achieved a new unity. But was he the 'onlie-begetter', alone, unaided or was there deeper within him some more powerful creative impulse for which he was merely the vessel? Other artists - da Vinci, Picasso for example - have indicated this sensation and there is evidence to suggest that Stanley certainly felt it. He saw the impulse as religious, initially as part of the meaning behind the Christianity he imbibed in his young days, but extending in later life to other faiths and absorbing support from them.
It has already been proposed in this website that the terms Stanley used - 'God', 'Christ', 'Heaven', 'Resurrection', 'the Holy Spirit' - were the accepted 'sign-language' of the paradigm through which the mysteries of such ecstasies were generally expressed in his milieu, as they still are in many codes today. But for those who no longer accept such codes, Stanley's use of them in his visionary writings should not be taken so literally as to diminish his meanings. His terms can readily be transposed into any sign-language or semiology the involved reader finds more appropriate.
In whatever form Stanley conceived God - and for him it may have had to do with his classic concept of universal Love - he believed that everything he found himself under compulsion to undertake was done to the honouring of his God. In that sense he was when in visionary mode a true Son of his God, an Imitation of the Christ of the Bible he was familiar with from childhood or of those other figures such as Buddha whose spiritual outlook he came to appreciate in later years.
Today the Modernist principles of classic art to which Stanley adhered no longer prevail to the same extent. Most present artists favour visual emphasis on immediate emotion, a reversion to the Romantic art of the nineteenth century albeit in plastic formats often more startling than the graphic of Stanley's day. But whatever direction art may take in the future, we should remain grateful to Stanley for the vision offered us. It was a joyful vision, compounded of the wonder and gratitude of being human and alive.
Perhaps the art of Sir Stanley Spencer is ultimately saying,
without the least attempt at preaching, that we can each aim to value a
similar joy in our own lives however differently we may conceive or express
it.