RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK - Palm Sunday

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

Stanley Spencer’s “Christ's Entry into Jerusalem” (1920); Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries

It’s Palm Sunday, and we're in Disneyland for our son Kai’s 32nd birthday (no church). Today’s Gospel: Mark 11: 1-11 recounts Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, but UK painter Stanley Spencer has a different insight. In his visual storytelling, we don’t see the palm-wavers but those who shunned him. He also places the moment in his own time and his hometown of Cookham. It's an unorthodox approach, and we like it. What if Christ arrived in your hometown today? That’s why “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem” by Stanley Spencer is our art of the week.

Sotheby's to offer a self-portrait of Sir Stanley Spencer as a youth painted in the year before his death

ARTDAILY

Sir Stanley Spencer's "Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta: Punts by the River," oil on canvas, (1958). Est. £3,000,000 – 5,000,000. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

LONDON---Stanley Spencer is an artist for whom the intimate and everyday was inseparable from the eternal and ineffable. His paintings transform ordinary people and familiar places, with his native village of Cookham portrayed as a Holy Land of miracles and divine intervention. Punts by the River belongs to his series ‘Christ Preaching from Cookham Regatta’, envisaged as one of six paintings to accompany his 17-foot-long centre piece of the subject that remained unfinished on his death and which now hangs at the Stanley Spencer gallery in Cookham. Having remained in the same private collection since it was acquired in 1959, the painting will go on view to the public for the first time since 1961, as part of Sotheby's Modern British Week exhibitions on Friday 8 – Tuesday 12 June 2018. [More]

Sex and spirituality: Stanley Spencer’s ‘visions’ return to Cookham

THE GUARDIAN
By Harriet Sherwood

The Last Supper, 1920, with the naked feet and bony toes of the apostles, is the ‘real gem’ of the Cookham collection. Photograph: © Stanley Spencer Estate/Bridgeman Images, London

CAMBRIDGE, UK---Stanley Spencer was one of the most inspirational artists of the 20th century, a visionary who painted real village folk in grandiose biblical scenes, and the creator of the most important artistic first world war memorial in the UK. The 21 works in the new exhibition include Love on the Moor, a subversive celebration of free love which took 18 years to complete. It was first bought by Spencer’s lawyer, Wilfrid Evill, and has been loaned to the gallery by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The Last Supper, painted as a scene in Cookham malt house, was initially bought by Sir Henry Slesser, a judge and socialist. Spencer lived with Slesser and his wife Margaret for over a year, and included the patron in one of his most famous works, The Resurrection, Cookham. [More]