Latest news with #StanleySpencerGallery
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gormley's early mettle, AI paint pals and sky-high snogs – the week in art
Antony GormleyGormley's early sculptures are cast from his own body and have a macabre, almost archaeological beauty that recalls prehistoric and ancient Egyptian art. White Cube Mason's Yard, London, until 8 June Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and BeastsThis exhibition that opens on JMW Turner's 250th birthday explores a lesser known aspect of his art: his depictions of animals. Turner's House, London, from 23 April to 26 October Laura Lancaster & Rachel Lancaster: Remember, SomewhereThe identical Lancaster twins are both painters, though with different styles and sensibilities. Baltic, Gateshead, until 12 October That Marvellous AtmosphereStanley Spencer's epic vision of a tumultuous, happy occasion, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, gets an airing. Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, until 2 November David Salle: Some Versions of PastoralThe postmodernist painter lets AI remix his works, embracing instead of fearing the robot future. Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, until 8 June A rare bronze of Le Baiser (The Kiss), produced during Rodin's lifetime and signed by the artist will be auctioned this month. The 60cm-high bronze was one of the first three cast in this size. It was commissioned in 1904 by the Argentine Jockey Club to be presented as a marriage gift to Lucien Mérignac, the French fencing champion, and has since sat in the living room of a family home in western France. It is expected to pass €500,000 at auction. Martin Parr went to Japan to photograph cherry blossom season in Kyoto An auction of 40 Roy Lichtenstein works is expected to raise £26m The Guardian wondered how pleased William Morris would be by his current ubiquity Perth, Australia, is under pressure to drop plans for a seven-metre statue of an astronaut 'Art thief' Wayne Thiebaud was more than inspired by other artists The design for a 12-metre high mosaic for victims of the 2011 Utøya island killings has been revealed Jericho Skull, 8500BC-6000BC This is one of the earliest surviving images of a human face – and one of the most memorable. Thousands of years before the creation of Stonehenge, the creator or creators of this daring sculpture took a real skull, probably of an ancestor or someone recently dead whose being they wanted to preserve, and filled in its lower face with plaster to make it more lifelike. Then they added bright white shells for eyes. The disconcerting thing is how deeply this primitive, ritualistic artwork gets to the essence of portraiture. In Renaissance Florence, the faces of portrait busts were often modelled on death masks in a practice not a million miles from this. In the same era in Bruges, Jan van Eyck gave one of his painted portraits the inscription 'Loyal Remembrance', expressing the very same desire as the ancient people of Jericho to preserve a person. Photography has made portraiture a still more efficient posthumous preservative. In the era of the selfie, the images of the dead linger as ghosts in the machine. The creator of this object understood art, and death, and the urge to remember. British Museum, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
Telegraph
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
That Marvellous Atmosphere, Stanley Spencer Gallery: Intoxicating mayhem in a quaint Berkshire village
That Marvellous Atmosphere at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham hones in on the artist's last major work, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1952-9). The ambitious painting, just over 2m x 5m, was nine years in the making and left unfinished upon Stanley's untimely death in 1959. It relocates the New Testament episode of Christ preaching from a boat on Lake Galilee to the Grand Evening Concert at the Cookham Regatta. Christ, clad in a black boater and cassock, lunges, fire and brimstone, out of his wicker chair aboard the old horse ferry barge towards the assembled villagers, in their Sunday best. For those who are not familiar with Spencer's unorthodox work, the adaptation of biblical stories to a familiar socio-temporal iconography was an idiosyncratic part of his oeuvre. Some of his most famous paintings present religious scenes through the lens of the historic Thames-side village in which he grew up, most notably The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (1924-7), which depicts Stanley's contemporaries rising from the dead at the graveyard of the local Holy Trinity Church. Spencer is also known for his more provocative works. His paintings have sparked controversy as recently as 2023, when Love Among the Nations (1935) was deemed too 'racist' to keep on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Curator Amy Lim succinctly sums up the artistic world of Stanley Spencer as 'God, sex and Cookham'. He considered the village in which he grew up to be a 'Holy Suburb of Heaven' and often used his childhood memories as fodder for creative inspiration. This directs us back to the centrepiece of the Spencer Gallery's summer exhibition, which draws on the artist's recollection of the Cookham Regatta, a bustling social event that took place on Ascot Sunday to conclude the week of races in June. At its peak in 1890, the regatta was attended by 10,000 people, and the popularity of boating on the Thames is reflected in contemporary literature such as Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), which was written in the nearby Cookham Dean. The Spencer family's keen interest in the festivities is documented by Spencer's brother Gilbert who recalled 'how the gentry and their ladies in their evening clothes joined in with the hoi polloi … the mix-up was attractive and complete'. Spencer funnelled his whole imaginative world into this last great painting. His writings record that he stayed up sketching until four in the morning, and one of the studies on show was drawn on loo paper – it seems there wasn't a moment when he wasn't thinking about Christ Preaching. Unfortunately, Spencer was fiscally irresponsible and romantically indecisive (he at one point had two wives simultaneously, and ended up divorcing both). This meant that he spent the final decade of his life fulfilling commissions in order to support himself, rather than working on his less commercial passion project. Spencer's tableau Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1956-7) is one-part surrealist, one-part Botticelli, and two-parts mad. If this picture, on loan to the Stanley Spencer Gallery from the Tate, is anything to go by, the finished version of Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta may even have rivalled his paintings at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere for a position to be his masterpiece. When Spencer died, he had completed three-fifths of the canvas; his patron Viscount Astor bought the unfinished painting and exhibited it at the 1960 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where it was praised as 'the epitaph of Genius'. The Stanley Spencer Gallery was founded soon after this in 1962, in a converted Methodist chapel that Spencer used to attend with his mother. The gallery is run entirely by volunteers, who are admirably dedicated to upholding the legacy of this local artist. From the talented and exceptionally knowledgeable Lim, to the wonderful trustees who get involved in the intricacies of gallery logistics (right down to designing the tote bags) – it is impressive to see the community coming together to celebrate this kooky Cookham disciple. Until Nov 2;
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- The Guardian
‘We love watching the landscape respond to each season': why hiking long-distance trails in bite-size chunks is more fun
It is 7.30am. The sky is a pink-and-gold blur, and the breeze is invigorating. It's a perfect day to walk from my London home to the source of the River Thames. I'm travelling light – phone, sandwich, water bottle – so I need nothing but a pair of capacious pockets. I have been walking the 185-mile Thames Path National Trail, with my friend Rhiannon, for more than four years. We do it bit by bit, a section at a time. No need to carry a heavy backpack. No need to book a hotel or pitch a tent. No need to use up weeks of precious holiday. No need to fret about whether we may fall out, or whether one of us will prove more ruggedly resilient than the other; nor any of the myriad factors that must be considered when planning a long-distance hike with a companion. And yes, we're always back in time for a night in our own beds. These are just some of the practical benefits of hiking a long-distance trail in bite-size chunks, which compensate for the extra time we spend on travelling and logistics. This morning, for example, I must catch a bus, a tube and then a train to get to the point where we finished six months previously. But by 9am I'm at Henley on-Thames, almost exactly as Rhiannon arrives from her Surrey home. We will walk for just over 12 miles, stopping anywhere we fancy – the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham and a Marlow church distracted us on the last stretch – eventually reaching Tilehurst, where we'll catch different trains home. Rhiannon and I can go for months without seeing each other, but our Thames walking days are sacrosanct: an opportunity to walk and talk that no other outing offers. On these days, we catch up on all that has happened during the intervening time – births, deaths, marriages, career changes, world affairs; all the 'big' topics are picked over, alongside the purging flow of the river. The appeal of a long-distance trail or a pilgrimage is often said to lie in its sense of immersion, its soothing day-after-day rhythm and the escape this offers from our humdrum lives. Holiday companies and guidebooks encourage us to walk a trail in a single time period, at the weather-appropriate time of year. In fairness, I love walking like this. But, like most people, I have to accommodate work and family commitments that make it difficult to disappear for days (or even weeks) on end. For me, bit-by-bit hikes have been the solution, enabling me to explore dozens of routes, with different people, throughout the year. I am currently mid-trail on the South Downs Way with my husband, thanks to a year of sporadic daylong walks, often grabbed at the last minute. The 100-mile route from Winchester to Eastbourne follows old routes and droveways along the chalk escarpment and ridges of the South Downs: having started in Eastbourne, East Sussex, we have finally reached Cocking in West Sussex. We've loved watching the landscape respond to each season: scoured by spring rain, basking in summer sunshine, aflame with autumn colour and, more recently, glittering beneath winter frost. All this, not to mention the very different views and wildlife, would have been missed had we walked the route in the traditional eight or nine continuous days. We have yet to spend a night away from our own beds. But as we approach Winchester this may be inevitable, so we've earmarked a couple of quirky pubs along the way (micro-hikes lend themselves just as successfully to weekends, but booking places to stay in advance rather dents the spontaneous feel). For now, we're revelling in the memories of chalk cliffs, fields of orchids, the tiny medieval churches we keep stumbling across and excellent pubs along the way. Walkers need feeding and the Ram Inn at Firle and the Black Horse in Amberley fed us exceptionally well. I am also halfway along the 28-mile Medway Valley walk, alone, where the constant companionship of the river and the rich array of history – from Tonbridge Castle to ancient bridges – seems to reflect my own journey through life, while reminding me that we're never truly alone. River routes do this. Not only do they provide a steady supply of people to greet – dog walkers, anglers, kayakers – but the river itself becomes a companion of sorts. Finally, I'm four days into the King Charles III England Coast Path with my daughter, Saskia, who, as a busy medical student, can rarely manage more than two days at a time. When it's completed, this path will be 2,700 miles long, and I fully expect it to take the rest of my life: days and weekends snatched from my daughter's schedule to suit not only her career but my inevitably ageing muscles. As she is studying in Liverpool, we've hiked from there to Southport, as well as the sections between Pevensey Bay in East Sussex and Dungeness in Kent that are reachable from London. One day, all being well, we will join them together to make the full coastal path. And herein lies the true joy of the micro-hike approach to trail-walking with a companion: it binds a relationship over time. The Thames Path typically takes three weeks to walk, but my version with Rhiannon will take more than a decade, becoming part of our ongoing lived experience, a process during which we bring our changed selves repeatedly back to the river, further cementing a lifelong friendship with each section. This also brings a sense of perpetual purpose: we must both remain fit enough to reach the end. The bit-by-bit method of course presents a few logistical challenges: a couple of preparatory hours spent poring over maps and online timetables, plotting out routes, stations, bus stops and pubs where we can wait if need be. But I treat the ever-longer travel to and from the path as part of the adventure, and the logistical challenges as brain-fuel. Of course, the most effective brain fuel is the actual walking. A recent study found that people who logged more than 7,500 steps a day were 42% less likely to suffer depressive symptoms. Nor is it just our mental health that benefits from a good yomp: other recent research found that for each additional hour walked, life expectancy can increase by up to 6.3 hours. My calculations suggest, on this basis, that every day I walk might just give me an extra day and a half in which to finish the England Coast Path with my daughter. Either way, there really is no better pastime. In the UK, we are spoiled for choice with hundreds of distance trails crisscrossing the land. The big hitters are among the best in the world, but let's not forget the lesser-known routes. From my London desk, and thanks to my Go Jauntly walking app, I already have my eye on the London Outer Orbital Path (Loop), the Wealdway, the Vanguard Way, the Grand Union Canal path, the Green Chain Walk and the Greensand Way. None of these require a backpack, a place to sleep, an ultra-fit companion or extended time off work. It is a few months later and my phone flashes. It's a message from Rhiannon, pointing out that the sun is shining and the River Thames is calling. Our next 'leg' of the trail will take us to Goring. Or to Pangbourne, if winter has depleted our fitness. I check my map, then the weather forecast (another benefit of spontaneity), before sending my reply: 'Tomorrow?' Annabel Abbs is the author of Windswept: Why Women Walk, which is published by John Murray Press (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
