Men of the Clyde
exhibition of work by Stanley Spencer
at Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Brendan O'Neill

Walking into the Men of the Clyde exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is like walking into a church.

Stanley Spencer's vast paintings of Glasgow shipworkers during the Second World War adorn the walls like paintings of the Passion. But rather than paying homage to some mystical Messiah, the eight frieze-like paintings are a monument to hard graft and the dignity of man. Spencer was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee in 1940 to capture the shipyard workers' contribution to the war effort. He spent the next seven years studying every detail of every stage of shipbuilding at Lithgow's Kingston Yard at Port Glasgow - his aim being to capture the positive and the humane amid the horrors of war, in contrast to artists such as Paul Nash and Henry Moore, who used their War Artists commission to depict devastation and brutality.

The religious feel to the exhibition is no accident. Spencer was a profoundly religious painter, spending a large part of his life interpreting and reinterpreting the resurrection of Christ. Watching the riggers at work at Port Glasgow, Spencer said he was 'as disinclined to disturb the atmosphere as I would be to disturb a religious service.' His overall aim was to illustrate how men and women are 'most spiritually themselves when they are working'. Consequently, the series of paintings has a distinctly religious tone, transforming the shipyard workers from skivvies into other-worldly figures taking part in some modern-day Passion play.

To hammer this point home, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has brought together, for the first time ever, Spencer's Port Glasgow paintings with his Resurrection series, which was painted directly after the war. According to the gallery, 'we believe [this] is in the spirit of Spencer's original intention'. But in reality, this is where the exhibition falters. Spencer's vision at Port Glasgow was vivid and clear - he wanted to examine, study and understand the process of shipbuilding and to commit to canvas his vision of man and work.

In the first painting, Burners (1940), the scene is set with burners wearing protective goggles to protect their eyes from the unnatural light of their fiery tools. But in the background, observing the scene, is Spencer, wearing no such protective goggles - instead pulling his cap down to protect his eyes from getting damaged. It is significant that the first painting in the series should feature the artist dangerously observing his subjects. For Spencer, getting into the thick of the shipbuilding process was essential so that he could get to the root of the workers' daily lives.

William MacQuitty's famous black and white photographs of Spencer at Port Glasgow, also shown here, capture the artist observing his suroundings, cutting a lonely and determined figure against the blackness of the port. For Spencer, Port Glasgow became an obsession, his ambition being to fully understand shipbuilding so that he could create a monumental series of paintings which would capture man's toil and self-sacrifice. By contrast, the Resurrection paintings are confused and unclear. Painted after the war, to symbolise renewal and a new beginning, the series lacks the clarity of form and content which make the Port Glasgow paintings such an amazing achievement.

In Resurrection: The Reunion, Spencer depicts men, women and children climbing out of their graves, stretching, as if waking from a long sleep. Later, in Resurrection: Tidying, the same figures can be seen brushing one another's hair and cleaning themselves before returning to their normal lives. The series ends with Port Glasgow Cemetery, depicting a still, quiet graveyard with no people at all. The unity of purpose that makes each of the Port Glasgow paintings so stunning is missing here, giving way to an overly spiritual interpretation of postwar renewal.

It is telling that as you move along the Resurrection series, the people in the paintings become more and more like religious icons - they start off looking like everyday men and women, but gradually become bearded and winged individuals wearing long flowing cloths. The use of Passion imagery in the Port Glasgow paintings is an attempt to capture the heroism of man, but in the Resurrection series it becomes a crude symbolic device. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has done a great job of bringing together Spencer's most important works into one exhibition. But I couldn't help feeling that Spencer's unclear postwar vision takes away something of the power and vision of the Port Glasgow series, his greatest achievement.