From Publishers Weekly
The reputation of English visionary artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) has waxed and waned over the decades. This catalogue raisonne of his paintings, which combines 474 plates (314 in color) and an absorbing critical-biographical profile, should revive interest in an individualistic painter who welded the influences of the Pre-Raphaelites, Giotto, the Mexican realists and Futurism into highly personal allegories of peace, love, alienation and redemption. Bell, a University of Saskatchewan art historian who curated a Spencer exhibit at London's Royal Academy, unravels Spencer's mystical approach to painting, which was deeply rooted in the Bible. He discusses Spencer's obsessive courtship of Bloomsbury Group artist Patricia Preece; their marriage unleashed a welter of sexual imagery in Spencer's canvases. Featured here are religious pictures, war scenes, bustling satires of modern life, precise landscapes full of mystery and intimate portraits of friends and lovers.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Book Description
Stanley Spencer's reputation has grown rapidly in recent years, and his visionary contribution to British art and his true stature as an artist are now internationally recognised. This is an abridged version of the 1992 catalogue raisonne of Spencer's work compiled by the same author, reproducing many of the illustrations and some of the original narrative. The work is presented chronologically and divided between figurative and landscape.