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Humphrey Spender (1910-2005) was a British artist, designer, and photographer and brother of the poet Stephen Spender. After the War, Spender shifted away from photography towards art and design and went on to become a successful textile designer and painter as well as becoming a tutor at the Royal College of Art (1953–1975). Spender had initially studied architecture in London but in 1933, he set up a photographic studio. After two years working at the Daily Mirror under the name Lensman, he photographed in Bolton for the Mass Observation movement (an independent body aiming to record the reality of daily life in Britain). In 1938 he joined the newly founded, illustrated magazine Picture Post, where he took similar documentary photographs. Following a brief period of conscription in 1941, he spent the rest of the war as an official photographer and interpreter of photo-reconnaissance pictures. His work is held in numerous public collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, London and the Imperial War Museum, London.
There are twenty-three Humphrey Spender artworks held in public collections, the majority are paintings but also include photographs from his former career in photography. His paintings express fine technical detail and his subjects embraced social history, surrealism and abstraction. Composition from 1966 appears as a landscape but it is also an astute study in colour, contrast and illusion. At the time, the world was moving towards space travel, so perhaps this offers an image of an imagined, alien place. The effect is serene.
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