MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award:
As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART
Spencer's Lost Paradise
by Peter Fuller, 1980
Snt. Francis and The Birds, Stanley Spencer, 1935
As a child, I was sometimes taken to see the chapel Stanley Spencer covered with murals of the first world war at Burghclere in Berkshire. Spencer was admired within the Nonconformist milieu, within which I was brought up, as the last considerable religious artist. He impressed me deeply: I was fascinated by The resurrection of the soldiers on the east wall; there was something compellingly mundane about the way they rose from the ground amid mud and horses and handed in their white crosses to Christ.
Visiting his exhibition at the Royal Academy, I realized how deeply he is etched on my memory. This was not just the result of childhood impressionability. Although Spencer produced some atrocious works, this exhibition confirms that he was, at his best, a good, even a great, painter. But art teachers rarely recommend their students to look at him; art historians do not know what to say about him; and museum curators have no idea where to hang him. For a long time, his magnificent The Resurrection, Cookham was almost invisible in the darkness of a Tate stairway.
How are we to explain the Spencer phenomenon? He was born in Cookham in 1891, the seventh of eight children of the village music teacher. The family was intense, closed, talented and religiously fraught—father was church, mother chapel. Stanley and his younger brother, Gilbert (later also a painter), were educated by two elder sisters in a schoolroom behind the house. In 1907, Stanley attended art school in Maidenhead, where he drew from classical casts. In 1908, he went to the Slade where he was taught by Henry Tonks, who believed that the only basis of artistic expression was anatomical drawing.
His fellow-students nicknamed him ‘Cookham’ because he travelled up and down from the Berkshire village every day by train. Spencer’s early religious paintings, like The Nativity of 1912, and Zacharias and Elizabeth of 1914, are saturated with elements drawn from Cookham. They indicate how carefully he had been looking at early Renaissance painters, and they are compositionally impressive. But they also have the ring of expressive authenticity about them.
Speaking of these pictures, Spencer himself said in the 1940s that the religion which informed them was ‘utterly believed in.’ ‘Somehow religion was something to do with me, and I was to do with religion. It came into my vision quite naturally like the sky and rain.’ Religion was bound up with his continuing experience of his birthplacce, too. He once wrote: ‘I could see the richness that underlines the bible in Cookham in the hedges, in the yew trees.’
When Piero Della Francesca painted his Nativity (now in the National Gallery), he did so against the background of the Italian countryside. Through his compositional skills, he brought together his personal imagination, and his experience of the world as seen, and unified the two within a shared religious mythology. Few twentieth century painters have ever felt themselves to be in such a fortunate position. Until 1914, however, Spencer was.
The idyll was soon shattered. In old age, Spencer looked back on his early paintings. ‘Those pictures,’ he said, ‘have something that I have lost. When I left the Slade (in 1912), and went back to Cookham, I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My
Stanley Spencer, The Nativity, 1912, London University College ideas were beginning to unfold in fine order, when along comes the war and smashes everything.’ (Spencer enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps and served with field ambulances in Macedonia.) ‘When I came home, the divine sequence had gone. I just opened a shutter in my side and out rushed my pictures anyhow. Nothing was ever the same again.’
The first world war split Spencer’s imaginative life. Nonetheless, at first, this experience served only to enrich his work. Demobilized, he was commissioned to produce an official war painting. Travoys, of 1919, shows a dressing station during a battle in Macedonia. It is among the outstanding British paintings of our century.
Spencer saw the figures on stretchers ‘with the same veneration and awe as so many crucified Christs.’ Thus he found ‘a sense of peace in the middle of confusion,’ but one which is neither sentimental nor idealizing. The contrast between the picture’s calculated compositional serenity, and the searing tragedy it depicts evokes the sentiments of some of the finest Renaissance crucifixions.
Spencer produced other major works in the 1920s. But his greatest achievement of this, or any period was the Burghclere memorial chapel, which was commissioned to commemorate a dead officer and which he executed between 1927 and 1932. John Rothestein did not exaggerate when he contrasted it favourably with Matisse’s more famous chapel at Vence.
Nonetheless, there is a sudden falling off of Spencer’s creative powers after the completion of the chapel. In the beginning, the ‘earthly paradise’ of Cookham had, like all utopias, been elaborated out of transfigured elements of infantile, emotional experience, represented through religious pictorial conventions. Spencer tried to comprehend even the ‘negative utopia’ of war in these terms.
Significantly, he never engaged in ‘horrors of war’ painting. Burghclere shows ordinary soldiers doing everything but fighting, and rising from the dead rather than dying. The attempt to see war in terms of his ‘earthly paradise’ gave rise to his finest pictures. But the two would not truly fit, and he never successfully revived the idyll. Religion could no longer authentically mediate between his inner and outer worlds.
In 1932, after more than ten years’ absence, he moved back to Cookham. He painted many landscapes of the village, but there is about these works a deadening, sharp-focused literalism: Cookham is now clearly seen, but not felt. How different this glazed vision seems from when he looked lovingly on the same landscape for the elements of his early religious paintings. But Spencer was also seeking a mythology to fill the vacuum of his collapsed religious world-view. He thought he had found it in bodily relations between human beings.
You find hints of this in his continuing obsession with the resurrection, which began much earlier. Spencer never saw this as the coming of the cataclysmic spiritual Kingdom of God on earth, but rather as the collapse of the spiritual into the mundane. There is something resolutely common-or-garden about all those well-dressed village folk, popping out of their graves.
In the 1930s his view of religion became increasingly sexual. ‘The erotic side I am so drawn to really belongs to the very essence of religion,’ he once wrote. In 1935, he painted Love among the nations, in which utopia now becomes a kind of
Stanley Spencer, Travoys arrivingata dressing station, 1919, Imperial War Museum, London mutual masturbatory grappling between persons of all colours, races and creeds. ‘During the war,’ he commented concerning this picture, ‘when I contemplated the horror of my life, and the lives of those with me, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual, carnal love, bestiality, anything you like to call it. These are the joyful inheritances of mankind.’
Spencer’s attempt to translate religious experience into human terms sounds promising. In fact, it proved a pictorial disaster. Love among the nations is hideous. Sunflower and dog worship (in which sexual activity is extended to contact with the animal and vegetable worlds) and Adoration of the old men (in which a group of infatuated male geriatrics wait to be felt- up by village girls) are even more grotesque. Few of his scenes celebratory of sexual encounters and conjugal life are much better. So what went wrong?
The answer is partly pictorial. Many pioneers of the modern movement discovered that profane illumination could be expressed through a certain kind of aesthetic experience, dependent upon the emotional symbolism of form itself—the handling of paint substances, colours and shapes in ways evocative of significant affective states. You find this in Cezanne, post-impressionism, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and some recent abstract painting. You can see something similar in pre-Renaissance art, and, significantly, in very early Spencer, too. His picture, John Donne arriving in heaven, was not out of place in Fry’s 1912 post-impressionist show.
But Spencer despised such techniques, when they were not linked to specifically religious imagery. Pictorially, he came to insist exclusively on anatomical expression. He could not even take impressionism, complaining of its ‘utter lack of spiritual grace.’
Spencer’s failure was as much to do with his personal as his aesthetic limitations. The reduction of religious experience into secular terms cannot be done through instinctual, sexual love alone. The life of adult human beings embraces a gamut of emotions, of which the explicitly sexual forms just a part. Spencer’s vision of transformed human relations becomes a travesty. In the midst of Love among the nations he appears, clothed, while two naked Negresses fondle him. Thus was the ‘earthly paradise’ reduced.
He himself was incapable of full relationships. He married Hilda Carline when he was thirty-three. In 1935, he began a series of perverse nudes of Patricia Preece, sometimes including a self-portrait. These are redolent with oppressive sexual tension, but without trace of feeling in touch, composition or gesture. Hilda was divorced from Spencer in 1937, and he promptly married Preece. He invited his first wife to attend his honeymoon with his second, whereupon the latter (who was already established in an enduring lesbian relationship) accused him of adultery with the former, and declined to live with him.
He made repeated overtures to Hilda to remarry him; but she refused. He wrote her endless letters—some over 100 pages long—which were not inhibited by her death in 1950. Thus though Spencer celebrated good human relations as the realized essence of religion, he knew little about them. Even his affirmation of the sexual was born of frustration rather than fulfilment—and, in the paintings, this shows.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he often tried to revive his religious ‘world-view.’ Sometimes, in The Christ in the wildnerness series of 1939, or Southampton’s Resurrection, of 1947, he almost succeeded. But the repulsive, comic-book character of such works as The crucifixion of 1958 indicate only the desperateness with which he sought to invest the old mythology with meaning and feeling again.
The psychiatrist, Anthony Storr, has recently suggested that there is a special link between utopianism and sexual perversion. Both involve transfiguring the world according to one’s fantasies and wishes. When Spencer’s ‘earthly paradise’ collapsed, he failed to find a secular equivalent for it. Had he been a socialist, or even someone more sympathetic to modernist art, would he have fared any better? We cannot say. As it was, he lapsed into a chaos of perverse fantasy.
1980