In 1916 sociologist Georg Simmel published the book, Rembrandt: An essay in the philosophy of art. His intention was not to write a ‘normal’ sociology of art that might seek to contextualize Rembrandt and his work – socially, culturally, historically, and so on – on the basis that they might be understood ‘only in connection with social processes’ which were responsible for determining ‘when art exists’.1 Sociological contextualization tended to become a formal technique that removed from sight specific individual things and obviated their particularity whereas the correct philosophy must be to recognize the art-work as a thing-in-itself, an object in its own right. Simmel’s analysis of Rembrandt would offer a complex in which might be retained the individual meanings that the artist sought to invest in the universal form of human aesthetic expression.
This anthropological study of Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) does not ‘explain’ the artist and the art in terms of social or cultural context. It takes Stanley Spencer to be his own person. I want to examine how Spencer came to paint, what he understood himself to be painting, and whom he saw himself as painting for. In particular, what light can be thrown on the role that distortion played in the art: the apparently distorted way in which Spencer came to represent the human figure – its extremities in particular – in the visionary ‘figure-paintings’ or ‘couple paintings’ which he took to be his most important and characteristic, and by whose representation he wished to be widely known and esteemed?
Remarking on the way in which Spencer entitled a lecture that he gave on artistic inspiration, ‘One’s own way’, art historian Fiona Maccarthy confirms that Spencer did not imitate. His is ‘a body of work that is not remotely like any other painters’, ‘incomparably committed, original and inspirational’, whose visionary art ‘transformed the local scene into the epic with an ambitiousness and weird intensity unparalleled in British twentieth-century art’.2 Or, in the words of artist and critic Timothy Hyman, Stanley Spencer was the most fulfilled and courageous British painter of the twentieth century: ‘more original (more “irreplaceable”) than [Walter] Sickert, less formulaic than [Francis] Bacon.’3 Placing image and word alongside one another, Spencer challenged the artistic orthodoxies of his day – from French formalism to New York abstraction – so as to achieve in his art ‘a narrative of the self, unmatched in his time’.4 Again, in a newspaper article during his lifetime, Stanley Spencer is also characterized as ‘the last of the medieval artists’:
Had he lived four centuries ago he would still have been born too late. He has the gauche naïveté of a child, the simple faith of a saint, and the perkiness of a sparrow. Saint Francis would have understood him and welcomed him to Assisi, and Spencer would have been happy to be a member.5
Alongside an appreciation of the way that distortion figures in Spencer’s art I am interested to gauge the extent to which a viewing public can be said to have understood his vision. Was their view of Spencer and his art itself ‘distorted’? What might be learnt concerning the reception given to Spencer’s visionary work, both during his lifetime and since, by those near him emotionally and physically as well as by those (members of the public, fellow painters, art critics and historians, curators) who knew him by his work alone?
A third kind of question may also not be avoided: What is it to attempt to make these judgements, either concerning Stanley Spencer or ‘the’ public? Can anyone besides Spencer make any kind of authoritative pronouncement? Can Spencer’s own written and spoken pronouncements on his art be taken to be ‘authoritative’ commentaries on what he has otherwise chosen to ‘say’ through the medium of paint? The complex of my analysis extends to an appraisal of distortion as being an intrinsic and key aspect of both creation and communication. Beginning with the processes of Stanley Spencer’s inspiration and pictorial composition, I proceed to examine distortion as a social phenomenon between Stanley Spencer and others, to suggest finally that the psychological and the social processes find further echoes in the biological. Distortion as mutation appears as a widespread aspect of a human condition. A case study of the creativity and artistry of Stanley Spencer offers insight into processes of human consciousness and human sociality.
This approach to Spencer’s work and these questions differ, it must be said, from that advocated by a relatively recent and well-received statement of anthropological-disciplinary intent. Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) urged on anthropologists an understanding of an art object as having a particular agency by virtue of its cultural signification. Focusing on the social context of artistic production and circulation led the anthropologist to ask: ‘How does the art-object succeed in entrancing and entrapping recipients, and affecting them in a certain way?’ Artistic creativity, intentionality, even aesthetics, become secondary, here, to the cultural context and the mediatory role played by art objects in a social process.
Gell elaborates. A social science as distinct from a humanity aims to ‘make sense of behaviour in the context of social relations’: as a consequence of social relations.6 No human action, including creating art works, can ‘really be conceptualized in other than social terms’,7 for a number of reasons. First, because consciousness, intentionality and even embodiment are social constructs, deriving from socialization at particular times and places: ‘human minds are inevitably “social” minds, to the extent that we only know our own minds in a social context of some kind’, and ‘intentional action’ must translate as ‘action initiated in a social context and with social objectives in view.’8 The mind (of the artist, say) should be understood not as a series of inner, private experiences but as a phenomenon externalized in routine social practices, as cultural forms of life ‘out there in the public domain’.9 The practice of art is a kind of ingrained habit or ‘habitus’, a routine way of being and acting that is externally and socially derived and sanctioned. Second, the very notions of ‘art’, ‘creativity’, ‘intentionality’, ‘agency’, derive from the symbolic-classificatory schema of particular cultures and make no sense outside these. Anthropology concerns itself legitimately with forms of thought and action – ‘artistry’ – purely in terms of sociocultural classifications, and negates the so-called philosophical issues of what might be true beyond such classifications. ‘Creativity’, then, or ‘agency’ merely pertains to a ‘culturally prescribed framework for thinking about causation’.10 ‘Intention’ does not exist for the anthropologist except as a cultural concept. Lastly, even if one were concerned to transcribe actors’ intentions – should they be deemed to possess these in a particular sociocultural milieu – these offer little purchase on what actually transpires in social life: the social is a thing apart, its events, norms and structures possessing their own phenomenology: to see ‘intentions’ as impacting upon social process is a category mistake. In sum, Gell concludes, society and culture, structure and institution, classification and identity, norm and practice are known to the anthropologist, from the first principles of his science, as external realities not really states of mind. Says Gell: ‘a theory which...