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DISTORTION AND LOVE

to
Ann Danks
and
The Stanley Spencer Gallery

Distortion and Love

An Anthropological Reading of the Art and Life of Stanley Spencer

NIGEL RAPPORT
University of St Andrews, UK

First published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Nigel Rapport 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Nigel Rapport has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Rapport, Nigel, 1956- author.
Distortion and love : an anthropological reading of the art and life of Stanley Spencer / By Nigel Rapport.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-6134-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-6135-3 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-6136-0 (epub) 1. Spencer, Stanley, Sir, 1891-1959--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Spencer, Stanley, Sir, 1891-1959--Psychology. 3. Art and anthropology. I. Title.
N6797.S67R36 2016
759.2--dc23

2015026603

ISBN 9781472461346 (hbk)

Contents

Plates

Dont try to make a boiled-down simplified version
of anything I say (): the second-hand examples
I have seen of myself I could not recognise.

Stanley Spencer, in Stanley Spencer 18911959
(ed. D. Robinson, 1976: 7)

Anthropology is the study of our human kind, its universal nature and how it is differently lived in specific individual lives. This book is the study of one such life, that of Stanley Spencer. It is also a focus on a specific aspect of the human condition that is named distortion but might also be known as mutation or emergence. The terms of theoretical debate in anthropology often presume a state of coherency to pertain to human life and of replication at best of evolutionary development or patterned change. Anthropologists talk of social structure, culture, social system, habitus and the relation. But things fall apart: intentions do not fulfil themselves, plans go awry, systems and relations fail. Distortion is an attempt to chart empirically, and to analyse, an essential randomness in human life, and to begin theorizing again from this vantage point. I ask: How did distortion come about in Stanley Spencers art and how has it been received by viewers of the art not least, by Spencer himself and what, then, might this reveal about the place of distortion in human consciousness and human communication in general?

Since the ground-breaking biography of Stanley Spencer by Kenneth Pople in 1991, the momentum of art-historical treatments of the artist and his oeuvre the most individual and uncompromising artist of any century, as an Omnibus programme on BBC Television (Resurrecting Stanley) dubbed him in 2001 has increased. Spencer died in 1959. During his lifetime there were learned appreciations by R.H. Wilenski, Eric Newton, Elizabeth Rothenstein and others. Between 1959 and 1991 there were significant contributions by John Rothenstein, Gilbert Spencer, Richard Carline, Maurice Collis, Carolyn Leder and Duncan Robinson. Since 1991, there have been more retrospectives and numerous exhibitions accompanied by impressive books of colour reproductions. Jane Alison, Fiona MacCarthy, Judith Nesbitt, Joan George, Mary Kisler, Justin Paton, Edward King, Kitty Hauser, Tim Hyman, Patrick Wright, Andy Daniels, Paul Gough, Carolyn Leder (again) and Andrew Causey have all produced insightful commentaries. My work would not have been possible without these prior interventions.

I would like to single out, however, three works that I have found indispensible. They are the aforementioned Pople biography of Spencer, published by Collins, and the website Pople subsequently created: http://www.ikpople.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk. No one has devoted themselves intellectually to Stanley Spencer as has Kenneth Pople. Second, there is the complete catalogue of Spencers paintings produced by Keith Bell in 2001 (published by Phaidon) and extending to over 400 pages of incisive text and comprehensive listing and pictorial reproduction. Thirdly there is the account of Spencers letters and writings, compiled with exemplary care by Adrian Glew and published by the Tate Gallery in 2001.

I begin this book by acknowledging the above authors also because my own anthropological treatment of Stanley Spencer, his artistry and its public reception, pays particular attention to these writings. A significant part of my methodology is what I term curatorial. I endeavour to discover what Stanley Spencer meant by his distorted representations of the human figure, and then what these distortings have meant to those who have viewed and commented on his art. In attempting to do justice to this history I have found that I must cite Spencer and his commentators in detail and at length: I cannot replace the verbal accounts of the above art-critics, historians and painters who have written on Spencers art and life, and I cannot replace Spencers own words, some two or three million of which he left to posterity (and which are now largely stored in the Archive of the Tate Britain Gallery in London). Quoting from Spencers writing and also from a growing secondary literature on Stanley Spencer is the indispensible methodology.

My research has been funded by the Danish Research Board for Culture and Communication, as part of a collective project entitled Optimal Distortion: Ethnographic Explorations of Paradoxical Connections (Award 11105670). I acknowledge the generous support of the Board and also the continual encouragement of the other members of the project: Morten Nielsen, Morten Axel Pedersen, Nina Holm Vohnsen, Henrik Vigh, Lise Rjskjr Pedersen and Sandra Lori Petersen. The project has included meetings and stays and conversations in Copenhagen and Aarhus as well as St Andrews that I would not have missed.

I have also talked through ideas with other colleagues, at seminar presentations and informally. I would like to thank in this connection: Mark Harris, Andrew Irving, Huon Wardle, Paloma Gay y Blasco, Adam Reed, Stavroula Pipyrou, Trenholme Junghans, Victor Cova, Carolina Borda Nino, Qingqing Yang, Shuhua Chen, Helena Wulff, Peter Collins, Perle Mhl, Karen Fog Olwig, Anthony Cohen, James Fernandez, Michael Jackson, Tord Larsen, Solrun Williksen, Michael Blim, Tyrone Pitsis, Iain Munro, Andrea Whittle, Brendan Cassidy and Tom Normand.

My work has taken me to the Tate Gallery, to the Stanley Spencer Gallery, to the Sandham Memorial Chapel, and to specially arranged viewings at galleries around Britain. These visits would not have been so productive, would not even have been possible, without the friendly assistance of: Adrian Glew, Ann Danks, Carolyn Leder, Chrissy Rosenthal, Stuart Conlin and Alison Paton. At Ashgate Publishing I am greatly indebted to the senior commissioning editor Neil Jordan; thanks, too, to desk editor Kayleigh Huelin; Tim Ingolds support has been indispensable and very much appreciated.

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