SPENDER, Matthew Francis Michael 1945-2026

[Richard R]

He was s of the poet Sir Stephen Harold SPENDER CBE 1909-95 (s of Violet Hilda SCHUSTER 1878-1921 gd of Francis Joseph SCHUSTER 1823-1906 who was f of Sir Felix Otto SCHUSTER 1 Bt 1854-1936, ext 1996) and his second & former wife Natasha Gordon LITVIN 1919-2010 d of Edwin EVANS 1874-1945 and Rachel LITVIN 1890-1977. He m Maro d of Arshile GORKY 1904-48 and as her 1 h Agnes Ethel MAGRUDER 1921-2013, and had two daus.

Obit in the Times of 5 June 2026:

E X T R A C T

Matthew Spender obituary: sculptor and painter

Visual artist whose candid memoir included one of the most searching portraits written of his father, Sir Stephen Spender 

When Matthew Spender was a schoolboy trying to master English grammar, help arrived from an unusual source. Over breakfast in the family house in St John’s Wood, the poet WH Auden explained the use of adjectives to him. Such episodes seemed almost ordinary in the household of his parents, Sir Stephen and Natasha Spender, where poets, composers, critics and intellectuals passed continually through the drawing room.
Only later did Spender come to understand that he had grown up at the centre of one of the most remarkable literary circles of 20th-century Britain. He memorialised that world with candour in his memoir A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents (2015). He deals with his parents’ unconventional marriage, how his mother dealt with her husband’s bisexuality and whether Stephen Spender knew, as a former communist, that Encounter, the magazine he edited, was funded by the CIA. Remarkably, the book manages to steer clear of washing the family’s soiled linen in public and instead succeeds as a successful exorcism of family ghosts.
Mathew Spender was born in 1945, at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in west London, during the closing weeks of the Second World War. One of the last V2 rockets to fall on London exploded nearby, close to Maresfield Gardens, as Europe moved towards peace. The child born as the last horrors of the conflict played out grew up in a household that became one of the meeting places of Britain’s postwar literary and intellectual elite…

… He grew up with his sister Elizabeth, known as Lizzie, who later married the Australian comedian, writer and actor Barry Humphries…

… If Matthew Spender inherited one remarkable artistic lineage by birth, he acquired another through marriage. In 1967, he married Maro Gorky, the painter and daughter of the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. The marriage joined two families whose histories had been shaped by some of the defining artistic movements of the 20th century. Many years later, Spender would repay that inheritance with From a High Place (1999), his biography of his father-in-law, a work that combined family insight with the discipline of a serious historian…

Matthew Spender, sculptor and painter, was born on March 13, 1945. He died of undisclosed causes on May 31, 2026, aged 81

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/matthew-spender-obituary-sculptor-and-painter-7t8rfhggh