Stanley Spencer

"Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) is one of the best-known, most highly regarded and best-loved of all twentieth-century British artists. He is famous for two things: his immortalisation of his home village of Cookham; and his celebration of sex both in his painted works and in his unconventional attitudes to relationships. His aim as a mature artist was to fuse together in his work things that are thought of as separate: religion and sex, the real and the imaginary, love and dirt, public and private, the young and the old, the heavenly and the earthbound, the self and others." "Kitty Hauser shows how Spencer's visionary imagination was rooted in specific places, experiences and social relations, and how he transformed these things into his startling pictures."--BOOK JACKET.