LONDON -- As one who once wrote a book titled "The Golden Age Is
in Us," I took myself off on a Saturday to see Paradise, an exhibition at
the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The traveling show had already
been shown in Bristol and Newcastle, attracting 160,000 people, apparently
double what they would have expected normally in those galleries. People
want to know the lineaments of paradise, whose earthly possibilities
utopians used to spend much time usefully describing, though not much
anymore.
The show turned out to be patchy, with the curator scraping
together a show from available ingredients, such as a Boucher, a Gauguin, a
Constable, a Monet, a Rothko, a couple of Renaissance paintings and so
forth. But making my visit entirely worthwhile was one marvelous painting,
one of Stanley Spencer's Cookham paintings about the Last Judgment, done in
1934. It shows a dustman resurrected in his beefy wife's arms, she in
"ecstatic communion with the dustman's corduroy trousers," as Spencer put
it. Other dustmen and women, plus a cat, surround the couple.
"I feel, in this Dustman picture," Spencer wrote, "that it is