Customer Reviews (2)

the best of Stanley spencer
I have read most of the books on Stanley Spencer. This book has the most plates and an in depth discussion of the work and life of Sir Stanley. Another book I would like is : the sketchbooks of Stanley Spencer. His drawings are not slick they are a bit crude and naive by art school standards He was a student of Tonks . Philip Evergood also studied with Tonks and his drawings are similar. They have a childlike naivete that I like.

Stanley Spencer
This is an excellent survey of the work of the English painter Stanley Spencer.It contains work from the early periods of his life that you rarely have an opportunity to see. There is a very in depth and critical veiw intothe life of this great artist. The reproductions of the work are almost allin color and of high quality. This is a book that clearly shows thatSpencer was that English artist who has been the inspiration of manyEnglish artist who followed him. The range of his work is truly exceptionalfrom the religious to the nude studies and portraits of family. This is theBook that is a must to have if you are looking at figurative painting inthe 20th century. It is expansive and completely beautiful. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Best art book I've ever seen; definitive
This book is very well put together. If you like Spencer you will refer to it constantly above all other works about him (except a full length biography). There's a lot of writing about his life, and there are many,many color plates of his paintings that provide real depth of viewing whatthis person was about. All of this is in a pleasing font and design. Thebest art book I've ever seen. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent Introduction
I really enjoyed this book. This is a concise (about 120 pages of text) and well illustrated (about 100 images) introduction to the remarkable English painter Stanley Spencer.Robinson's text provides a useful biography of Spencer's career, a good idea of his rather unconventional ideas, and short accounts of how he fit into the artistic currents of his times.The selection of images is very good and illustrates well the range of Spencer's work and its evolution over his long and productive career.
Spencer is known best for his religious paintings, notably the powerful mural The Resurrection of the Soldiers in the Sandham Memorial Chapel.A man of deep and unconventional faith, Spencer produced a large number of canvases with religious themes, usually fusing the sacred and the quotidian.A native of the village of Cookham, where he spent much of his working life, the environs of his town were literally sacred ground to Spencer. This resulted in a very personal but surprisingly effective icongraphy.
What makes this book particularly enjoyable is the revelation of the range of Spencer's art.Spencer was also an outstanding landscape painter and a superb portraitist.This book reproduces a number of lovely landscape paintings.Some of the portraits reproduced, both drawings and paintings, are stunning.

An Introduction, by fermed
Duncan Robinson is a professor at Yale, and his book on Stanley Spencer is a fine introduction to this mad eccentric from Cookham-on-Thames. Not long ago (1998) there was an exhibit of Spencer's work that traveled the United States, and so his name in this country is not as unknown as it used to be. Whether one is familiar with his work or not, this is a well balanced and nicely printed book, with over 100 reproductions, of which at least half are in color. I keep the book handy and have given copies of it to unsuspecting friends and relatives, who then (usually) become addicts of Mr. Spencer.

For those who have never seen Spencer's work, I certainly recommend using the internet as a first step in getting a feel for what he biographical and bibliographical information (although Robinson's book is not mentioned). The main drawback about looking at pictures on the internet is that many are so small and distorted that they dishonor the works they are trying to show; still, a visual approach is more effective than trying to describe the work of this extraordinary painter verbally. The pictures in Robinson's book, in contrast, are excellent reproductions and quite adequate as a means of presenting Spencer's work. I took a copy of this book to his exhibit and was satisfied with the quality of the reproductions one of England's most important painters of the 20th century. ... Read more

Book Description

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.

Book Description
This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Foundation for Cultural Review on January 1, 1998. The length of the article is 931 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: "Stanley Spencer: An English Vision".(Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.)
Author: Hilton Kramer
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 1998
Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review
Volume: 16Issue: 5Page: 43

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
Stanley Spencerwas one of Britain s greatest twentieth-century artists. He became famous for two things: his celebration and immortalisation of his home town of Cookham in Berkshire - hisheaven on earth as he lovingly called it - and the fusion in his paintings of sex and religion, the heavenly and the ordinary.In 1915 Spencer left home to serve as a medical orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol. Aged 24, he had rarely stayed away overnight from home. For ten months he scrubbed floors, bandaged convalescent soldiers and carried supplies around the vast, former lunatic asylum.In 1916 he signed up for overseas duty in Macedonia, where he saw violent action up to the eve of the Armistice. Five years after the war, Spencer started making large drawings of a possible memorial scheme based on his wartime experiences. So extraordinary were his sketches, and so committed was he to realising them in paint, that the Behrend family became his patrons, funding a purpose-built memorial ch ... Read more

Amazon.com
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. ... Read more