Trumpets in Cookham

The annual summer shows of the British Royal Academy are apt to be huge, and hugely dull affairs. This year's exhibition, which opened in London last week, was something of an exception. Besides the academy's standard landscapes and lackluster likenesses, it featured an ambitious composition by 71-year-old Portraitist Augustus John and some pretty splashings by top-ranking Honorary Member Winston Churchill. It also boasted one picture that made all the rest look pale: a new 21-by-7-ft. Resurrection by Stanley Spencer, a frayed little sparrow of a man who may well be a modern master.

At 58, Spencer is almost as baffling as he is brilliant. A crackerjack technician, he earns his living by grinding out neat, sunny scenes of the Berkshire countryside around his home town of Cookham (pop. 6,000). Collectors scrabble for them, but compared with his serious paintings Spencer's landscapes are impressive bores. His real work is illustrating the Bible, in pictures that reflect his love of complex patterns and muted color. They are strictly Cookham and often tantalizingly obscure.

Home Tombs. The seventh child of a Cookham organist, Spencer has stuck to the town all his life (except for a stretch of military service in World War I) and crammed his religious paintings with its people and places. Like his 1926 Resurrection, which now hangs in London's Tate Gallery, Spencer's new version of Judgment Day is laid in the Cookham graveyard. Its risen dead are a queerly turned lot, dressed in puppet-show clothes. They are tightly knotted into a composition that borrows something both from cubism and from the 16th Century Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel.

Like Bruegel's work, Resurrection is rich in anecdote. Among other things, it shows a sailor greeting his girl, a crowd raising a tombstone, children reading inscriptions, old folks on all fours, a group gazing ecstatically heavenward, and a plump gravedigger, his work done, surveying the whole scene. Last week Resurrection earned a wide and rather startled audience; London's popular press wrote the painting up as "the picture of the year."

Rum Fun. Royal Academy President Sir Gerald Kelly, 71, was of two minds about it. "I dislike distortion," he confessed, "and I wish Spencer's figures were more representational. Instead he picks his design and then twists his figures to fit into it. But I suppose his rumness just adds to the fun of his painting."

Back of the rum fun stood an individualist whose openhearted Christianity commanded as much respect as his painting skill. He had done the Resurrection, Spencer said, for a very simple reason: "If you are going to paint anything good, you've got to link up with something good . . . something holy. What's holier than the dead and the idea of their coming back to bask in life, another kind of life?"

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