Stanley Spencer.
by Kitty Hauser
from Princeton University Press
One of the most highly regarded and well known of all twentieth-century British artists, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) is famous for two things. He immortalized the Berkshire village of Cookham, where he was born and spent most of his life. And he celebrated sex both on his canvases and through his unconventional understanding of relationships.
Perhaps best known for his paintings of biblical subjects set in and around Cookham--in particular, The Resurrection, Cookham--Spencer was also an official war artist during both World Wars. In his paintings and in his life, he reveled in the intense ordinariness of the world he inhabited. His mature art fuses things most often thought of as separate: religion and sex, the real and the imaginary, public and private, the young and the old, the self and others.
In this excellent introduction to the artist and his work, Kitty Hauser reveals how Spencer's art grew out of places, experiences, and social relations that enriched his imagination. Though Spencer is often described as visionary, this book shows that his brand of mysticism was firmly grounded in material reality--in landscapes, homes, and the human relationships he felt so strongly.
The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art : Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer
from Lund Humphries Publishers
Stanley Spencer: A Biography
by Kenneth Pople
from Harpercollins
Painter Stanley Spencer is a biographer's dream: his art is intensely personal, reflecting real people and places from his life; the controversy surrounding his private life and work guaranteed a stream of contemporary accounts about both; moreover, he was an enthusiastic chronicler of his own intentions, leaving behind vast quantities of diaries, letters, and notes. Author Kenneth Pople has utilized the wealth of information about his subject to produce Stanley Spencer: A Biography, a scrupulously researched examination of the complicated artist. Though Spencer's art had fallen out of favor in the years following his death, Stanley, the award-winning play based on his life, has renewed public interest in the man and his work, making Pople's biography timely, indeed.
Stanley Spencer is divided into 47 chapters, each one concentrating on a specific painting, through which Pople attempts to illuminate a particular period of the artist's life. He is especially strong at analyzing the work itself, but less so at breathing life into the people who surrounded Spencer: his family, wives, mistresses, and friends. Nevertheless, Kenneth Pople has brought valuable new insights to the work of Stanley Spencer, a gift for which art lovers can be grateful.
STANLEY SPENCER'S GREAT WAR DIARIES
by Edited by Karen Wilks Stanley Spencer MC
from Pen and Sword
Stanley Spencer enlisted with the Royal Fusiliers as a private in 1915 and was commissioned in 1917 and thereafter served with the West Yorkshire Regiment until demobilized in 1919. He saw almost continuous active service from 1915 to the end of the War. he was present at the Battle of the Somme (well described), Montaubon and Vimy Ridge. He was slightly wounded on three occasions and was awarded the Military Cross for his role in a particularly successful trench raid on 1 August 1918. He writes of his experiences in a frank and graphic way.
Stanley Spencer: An English Vision
by Fiona MacCarthy
from Yale University Press
Stanley Spencer`s extreme combination of the homely and the weird has baffled viewers of his paintings. In this book, MacCarthy investigates Spencer`s life, sets his work in its cultural context, and emphasizes the links between his life and his paintings. This volume provides a comprehensive account of a profoundly original artist and his work.
Stanley Spencer: Letters and Writings
by Adrian Glew
from Tate
Stanley Spencer is recognized as a British artist of singular vision, but he was also a prolific and highly individual writer. In moments between painting, Spencer wrote thousands of letters. He filled notebooks, diaries, and scraps of paper, recording his daily thoughts and future plans in a distinctly Spencerian manner. This book brings together for the first time an extensive selection of Spencer's key letters, notes, and theoretical writings, including important sections of Spencer's autobigraphy which remained unfinished at the time of his death. Spencer always believed that his writings were as important as his paintings, and this volume offers a unique insight into Spencer as writer, thinker, and artist.
Men of the Clyde: Stanley Spencer's Vision at Port Glasgow
by National Galleries Of Scotland
from National Galleries Of Scotland
Features Stanley Spencer's epic paintings of Lithgow's shipyard. The pictures depict the different trades and activities invloved in the great collective enterprise of building a ship.
Stanley Spencer: Christ in the wilderness
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