Sins of the flesh

Eccentric and determinedly unmodern, Stanley Spencer was marginalised in his day, and even now his frank depictions of flesh are disturbing. So what makes this artist so significant?

Stanley Spencer, who lived from 1891 to 1959, is one of the great eccentric outsiders who feature large in the history of British art. He is most frequently compared to William Blake, with whom he shared a visionary intensity and an inextricable combination of religious and earthly concerns. But after auspicious beginnings as an artist, and the achievement of a kind of renown, Spencer found himself progressively sidelined and rejected by an indifferent and sometimes antagonistic art establishment. By the time of his death his work was widely disparaged, and he was soon all but forgotten.

There were a number of reasons for this. No matter which way you look at it, he was indeed an eccentric, parochial outsider. His pictorial re-enactments of biblical scenes in his native Cookham, a village on the Thames near Windsor, were anachronistic and, taken with his almost Pre-Raphaelite style of meticulous realism, rendered him embarrassingly unmodern at a time when everyone else was striving to be as modern as possible. On the other hand, some of his paintings, notably the "naked portraits" and associated worlds from the 1930s, were out of their time in a different way, disturbing in their frank depiction of flesh.

Unacceptable - and unshowable - at the time, they are still remarkably powerful paintings, even for an audience accustomed to Lucian Freud's unflinching gaze. And, incidentally, one thing this exhibition makes abundantly clear is Freud's considerable debt to Spencer.

Particularly within the past decade or so, Spencer's star has been in the ascendant. As he has stayed the same, it's we who must have changed. Certainly, with the demise of international modernism, the postmodern art world is more tolerant of and receptive to those who didn't fit into the modernist game plan. Spencer's eccentricities can now be seen in a wider context. His loyalty to Cookham, for which he was branded incurably parochial, is more acceptable at a time when the derogation of authority from principal art centres is viewed as desirable.

When, in 1998, the British Council toured a Spencer retrospective in the United States and Mexico, the response was salutary. Judged in isolation from the distorting lens of received opinion, he was acclaimed as a star attraction rather than a quaint sideshow. His searching, painful pictorial analysis of identity and desire looked remarkably pertinent and contemporary. Even his complex biblical compositions were praised for their ambition - and, south of the border, the links between the communal aspects of his vision and the ideals of the Mexican muralists became apparent.

The Ulster Museum exhibition features about two-thirds of the work from the Tate Britain retrospective last year. There are some additions, mostly relating to a section of the show exploring Spencer's Belfast connection.

He travelled several times to visit his brother, a musician, in the city, and one painting is a fine depiction of the block of flats, with adjoining allotments, where he lived. As it happens, what is probably Spencer's most famous painting, the huge The Resurrection, Cookham, a startlingly literal visualisation from the mid 1920s of Cookham's inhabitants rising from their graves, was deemed too fragile to travel from its home in Tate Britain. Another masterpiece, his first World War murals at Sandham Memorial Chapel, in another Berkshire village, obviously do not travel. These aside, the show doesn't feel in any way lacking and gives a thorough, rounded view of the artist.

It is appropriate to say "the artist" as opposed to the art because, as Timothy Hyman notes in his catalogue essay, Spencer's work is "art as a narrative of the self". It is, you could say, self- obsessed, but not in a bad way. Spencer wrote in 1923 of his "desire to tell everybody everything" - and he did so, not only in images but also, as a prolific letter-writer, in words. The layout of the exhibition reflects this penchant for autobiographical disclosure. You are always within sight of one of the artist's many fine self-portraits or depictions of one of his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece.

His relationships with both women were central to his work, although Carline was the abiding presence in his life. But at the core of his world view, impinging on every aspect of that life, lay a profoundly religious sensibility. His Cookham childhood, as one of nine children (he was the second youngest), was extremely happy, so much so that its warmth and domesticity became the template for all future contentment.

When he went to the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, rather than moving he travelled back and forth every day, earning himself the nickname Cookham. His early work, which draws inventively and brilliantly on the qualities of early Italian painting and, by virtue of his exceptional visual memory, on his experience and knowledge of Cookham and its environs, gained him considerable acclaim.

The first World War diverted him from a path of smooth development. He enlisted and served first as a medical orderly in England and Macedonia, latterly as an infantryman. After the war, the artist Eric Gill made a forlorn bid to convert him to Catholicism. Spencer's Christian faith was far too personal and individual to accommodate the discipline entailed.

THOUGH politically liberal, the Spencer family was steeped in the King James Bible, and for Stanley the material world was always suffused with spiritual value. When he met and fell in love with Carline, he therefore had no problem in seeing sex as a sacramental activity. She, as a Christian Scientist, drew a more defined line between the material and the spiritual, which led to growing tensions in their relationship. That relationship remained, even after their divorce, extraordinarily close and loving.

Against a background of their disintegrating marriage, Preece arrived on the scene. She has had an unremittingly bad press. She cultivated Spencer's attentions without reciprocating his feelings. Although she was living quite happily with a partner, Dorothy Hepworth, she married him, out of motives that are generally regarded as mercenary.

He lavished clothes and jewellery on her and was tortured by her emotional indifference towards him. While, as he put it, she made her body available to him "at high rental", there was no possibility of the transcendent union he felt with Carline.

Ironically, his paintings of Preece, clothed and unclothed, are among his finest works. In the notorious Leg Of Mutton Nude the artist, an abject presence, crouches dejectedly over the naked body of Preece spread out before him, exposed but unattainable. The painting is a tour de force, a cruelly detailed landscape of flesh, muscle and bone weighed down by time and gravity, in which each centimetre of the body is itemised and inventoried. Spencer perceptively described his way of painting as being like an ant crawling over every bit of his subject's flesh. A leg of mutton in the foreground underlines the message that people are meat.

Throughout his career Spencer painted landscapes, usually of Cookham and the countryside around. There are many in the exhibition, and they stand up very well. He resented the time he gave to them, however, and was anxious to get back to his subject pictures. But it was the landscapes that paid the bills. Unlike his religious paintings, they were consistently in demand. He found little support for his notion of establishing what he called a "Church-House" to house his works, though he made some outstanding pieces in relation to it.

By the time of the second World War, his personal life was in tatters, both marriages finished. He moved around a great deal and, though he embarked on other relationships, they were not as satisfying, and his output reflects his unsettled state.

There are exceptions, however, notably the wartime commission to paint tramp steamers being built at a Clydeside shipyard. He rose brilliantly to the occasion, and the results offer a hint of what he might have achieved given a greater degree of official recognition and direction. But by then he was seriously out of fashion. By the time his friend Sir John Rothenstein organised a retrospective at the Tate, in 1955, his artistic reputation was beyond rehabilitation. Fellow artists and critics such as David Sylvester lined up to lambast his work. Finally, if belatedly, the balance is being redressed.

Stanley Spencer is at the Ulster Museum, Belfast (048-90383000)