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Unity Spencer with her painting Separation
‘It’s a sad painting, maybe an angry painting’ … Unity Spencer with her work Separation. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
‘It’s a sad painting, maybe an angry painting’ … Unity Spencer with her work Separation. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Unity Spencer: I want to tell the truth about my father Stanley

This article is more than 8 years old

She is the daughter of the great painter Stanley Spencer, and she has put the trauma and tragedy of her life into her own paintings. As she publishes her autobiography, Lucky to Be an Artist, Unity Spencer talks about breakdowns, losing her son – and her father’s marriage to a ‘predatory lesbian’

In an elegant claret-coloured anteroom, a heated discussion is taking place: a tangerine scream of a painting has been rejected by the curators hanging Unity Spencer’s life’s work. It must go in, protests her friend Christine. “It’s central to Unity’s work. So. Put. It. In.” “Yes, but where?” asks Unity’s son John, surveying the carefully co-ordinated oils and prints that wind up the stairs from the entrance hall of London’s Fine Arts Society.

You can see his point. Dating from the late 1970s, Separation (aka The Wound, aka Daggers) is not a companionable work. A naked woman kneels by a puddle of blood, facing away from the viewer towards a black hole pierced by daggers. In the background, a roughly sketched couple are hunched over as they take their leave. The composition is carved in two by a heavy diagonal bar. “It’s a sad painting, maybe an angry painting,” suggests its creator, tentatively. “It might even be a turning point.”

The diary-based autobiography, published to accompany Unity’s exhibition, reveals that, in 1978, she enrolled at a Quaker college, “became a bit manic”, and decided she had to leave Cookham, the Berkshire village made famous by her father, Stanley. It would take her another 18 years “to find happiness”, however.

Unity Spencer’s Separation (1979-80)

Life has been an emotional rollercoaster for Unity, the second of two daughters born to Stanley and Hilda Spencer. This may explain why it is only at the age of 84 that she is having her first major exhibition. The show will briefly reunite this stormily accomplished artist with paintings that have been rolled up in cupboards for more than half a century. Everything is for sale, alongside “11 Stanleys” owned by the family, and a scattering of pictures by Hilda, a talented artist in her own right, who became subsumed into her husband’s celebrity.

Unity was born in 1930, while her father was working on his famous murals at Burghclere Chapel. “D would wrap me in a shawl as a small baby and take me to the chapel with him, laying me on a chair while he painted,” she recalls in the book. Stanley (D) would record that time of happy domesticity in a 1955 painting of bathtime: he is carrying a bathtub, Unity’s older sister Shirin holds a mat, while Hilda is unbundling the infant Unity. “I always think of it as a sad painting, perhaps because of what was to come,” says Unity.

By the time she was three, the family had broken up, after Stanley left Hilda for another woman. Five years later, Hilda collapsed, consigning her daughters to a self-appointed guardian who Unity recalls with a shudder. “She did her best to look after me, but emotionally she knocked me down.”

Part of what saved Unity was her irrepressible talent, both as an artist and a dancer. Among the earliest works in the show is a perky lithograph of chickens in the moat at the tower of London, made in 1948, when she was just 18. Another, from the early 1950s, peeks behind the scenes of an opera based on The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I’m in the foreground because I was living in two worlds. I was a student at the Slade and a member of the chorus of The Merry Wives.” The dancing was abandoned – “because it hurt too much to stretch your leg on a rail” – but the painting remained.

‘He was naive’ … Unity in her father’s arms

The influence of her father can be seen in her early pictures, many of which (like his) are biblical narratives, though her style and palette are all her own, and the narrative is often hard to read. One depicts a woman putting money into a collection tin while a portly female cloakroom attendant looks on. It’s the parable of the widow’s offering, she says, from the book of Luke. There’s an audible intake of breath from her entourage when she adds: “The attendant is Christ.”

In her 30s, Unity fell into “the era of the ghastly Les Lambert”, a “clever conman”, who was already married but seduced her into thinking they belonged together. By now, her mother was too ill to advise her and her father was dead. “If daddy were alive, he’d have given him short shrift.” Les “nagged her” into becoming pregnant and their son, John, was born. “By this time,” she recalls in the book, “I had already had a nervous breakdown – or my first bout of real depression. The effort to control my anxiety and be the person Les wanted me to be became all-consuming and exhausting, until I began to feel that I was losing the ability to express my feelings at all.”

She made a series of touching pencil drawings of John as a baby, but her life was in a mess. “In 1962,” she writes, “it was still a disgrace to be a single mother. I suffered from severe anxiety, confusion and a frightening experience of slipping away from reality.” By the time John was three, she was using her diaries to record the measures she was taking to protect him. “Poor wee John. He loves his father. He is so trusting. Have I the strength to love Leslie for John’s sake?” By 1970, John had been made a ward of court and Unity had been admitted to a psychiatric day hospital.

A series of portraits in the exhibition record that period; among their subjects is “my dear friend Bob Low, who committed suicide in 1972”. She painted the work a few days after his death. “I was in love with Bob Low,” Unity writes. “The portrait seemed to paint itself. It seemed strange to me to paint a squash of red on his body, but I saw it there, and afterwards it occurred to me that it was his lifeblood. But it was also where his heart is, and expresses love.”

The battle for her own artistic identity was accompanied by a fight for her father’s legacy after his death. On behalf of herself and Shirin, she challenged his executors for a right to see his correspondence and was refused. In 1973, Stanley’s papers were acquired by the Tate, but as recently as 1997 the art historian Fiona McCarthy criticised the sisters for censoring the reproduction of his nudes. Writing in the Guardian, McCarthy said the paintings underlined “Spencer’s joyfulness and childlike love of life”.

Unity Spencer’s 1957 portrait of her father, Stanley

The article cited a 1937 work, The Artist and His Second Wife (aka The Leg of Mutton Nude). The sisters retaliated, arguing that they had never had a problem with their father’s sexual imagery: “The love-making is generous and no one is dominant. The great nudes should be seen in the context of his whole life’s work, whose main themes are resurrection and redemption.” But they believed this work, showing Stanley and his second wife naked, was a special case. “It portrays a non-event. Our father looks distressed, bewildered and very vulnerable. We have a right to protect our father in this one instance in the small way available to us.”

The “second wife” (the non-event) was Patricia Preece, who Unity believes was “a predatory lesbian” intent on breaking her family up to gain possession of Stanley’s artworks. “She pursued him for money,” she insists today. “He was naive rather than innocent.”

The altercation still rankles, though she professes not to remember much of the pain described in the diaries. Why, then, allow such intimate testimony to be published? “Because I want to speak the truth,” she insists, thumping her arm down in sudden vehemence. It’s a vehemence that points backwards to the tangerine scream, but also forward to her most recent work (she continues to paint in twice-weekly sessions at Putney School of Art and Design). Turning her back on the muddy brown allegories of her early paintings, she sets off up the staircase demanding: “Where are the dangly bits?”

We find “the dangly bits” halfway up, in an airy lithograph of male torsos dominated by pendulous genitals. “It’s called Rugby Scrum, or Six Nations,” harrumphs John, who has put his mother’s autobiography together and is about to embark on a multi-volume project collating his grandfather’s diaries. “It’s The Dangly Bits,” insists Unity, ever her father’s daughter, though speaking entirely in her own voice.

Unity Spencer: Lucky to Be an Artist is published by Unicorn Press. Buy it for £30 at bookshop.theguardian.com. The exhibition is at The Fine Art Society, London W1, until 17 April.

This article was amended on 1 April 2015. An earlier version of the footnote said that the exhibition finished on 9, rather than 17 April.

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