A Painter for the people : Stanley Spencer, art, politics and populism

This thesis is a study of the paintings of Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and is designed to
challenge received accounts of his work. Its theoretical perspective is that of 'cultural
materialism' and its purpose is to place Spencer and his pictures within the social, cultural
and political history of their time.
It begins by outlining the four critical constructions of 'Stanley Spencer' that it
challenges and by describing Spencer's somewhat oppositional location in the institutional
complex of the artistic field. Then, rather than adopt a conventional chronological
narrative, sets of paintings are studied in relation to their social context or historical
moment. Here, several fresh arguments are advanced about particular aspects of Spencer's
work. Thus, features of his landscape output are interpreted as at odds with a mainstream
tradition sponsoring dominant notions of 'Englishness'; his original and politically charged
solution to the problem of representing industrial labour is discussed; he is claimed as a
Realist painter and his role, alongside others, as a sympathetic investigator of everyday life
is examined; the 'stoic response' to the First World War of Spencer and his peers is
identified and differentiated from the 'traditionalist response' of the powerful and the
better known 'radical response' of the war poets; his libertarian sexual politics is specified
and the utopian dimension of his erotic pictures clarified; his paintings of Christ and
resurrection are then placed in the context of radical Protestant traditions.
Thus, rather than limiting itself to the biographical reductionism of earlier accounts or
the narrower art-historical approach of more recent 'revisionist' writing, this study offers a
way of understanding Spencer's work which emphasises its populist, radical and, in effect,
political dimensions. His art emerges as a profoundly public one - offering ordinary life
and experience as worthy of representation in forms aspiring to public display and
soliciting a new reading practice from viewers confronting them.

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