Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare

edited by Robert Ansell

There can be few artists whose life was quite as extraordinary as that of Austin Osman Spare. Born the son of a City of London policeman, in 1904 he became the youngest ever exhibitor at the Royal Academy and was celebrated by critics and London society alike, but at the apex of his fame the First World War and a failing marriage prompted him to return to his roots in South London. There, inspired by strange visions and the lives of those around him he devoted his rare talents to recording his thoughts, dreams and the world as he saw it: sublime, haunting and magical.

Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare is the long awaited full colour introduction to the work of this astonishing London artist. Accompanying an exhibition at The Maas Gallery (15a Clifford Street, London, W1) the book contains a comprehensive collection of his art complemented by a biographical introduction, a checklist of his exhibitions and essays by those who knew Spare well throughout his life, including classic recollections from Hannen Swaffer, Clifford Bax, Kenneth and Steffi Grant, Hadyn Mackay, Ithell Colquhoun, John Smith and others.

Landscape 4to, 240mm x 295mm
96 pages
74 colour illustrations

Hardback limited edition of 500 hand-numbered copies £58.00 + p&p

Paperback limited edition of 961 hand-numbered copies £29.50 + p&p

Reviews

It’s been a long, strange trip for Austin Osman Spare, artist, animist, occultist and outsider (FT144:34-40). By the late 1920s, at what some consider to be the height of his powers, he had more or less abandoned the art world though certainly not his art - for the hermetic life of a seer, living alone with his artist’s tools, his cats and his visions. Following his death in 1956, Spare’s vision was kept alive almost exclusively by occultists and esotericists, for whom he remains a powerful avatar, and it is predominantly within this world that his pictures have changed hands.

Now, it seems, his career is coming full circle, with a recent exhibition in London’s Mayfair, where the career of a 17-year-old Spare was ignited at the Royal Academy’s 1904 Summer show. Cynics might say that reintroducing Spare to the art world is merely a bid to chase more moneyed collectors - occultists, Spare himself amongst them, are traditionally penniless after all - but it’s a necessary move if Spare is to gain the status he deserves as one of he most remarkable British artists of the 20th century.

Borough Satyr arrives, then, with perfect timing, to bridge the gap between these two worlds; and to introduce Spare the artist to the occult community, and Spare the occultist to the art world. Ultimately, however, it is about Spare the man: this collection of essays and articles by critics, friends and admirers, drawn from various sources both during and beyond Spare’s lifetime, provides an elegantly rounded portrait of the artist, and of his uneasy relationship with the art and media establishments. This being a Fulgur book, it is exquisitely produced (even the errata slip is a thing of beauty) and profusely illustrated with fine examples of Spare’s work and photographs of the artist throughout his life.

Following a lucid and illuminating introduction from Fulgur’s Robert Ansell, we get “Boy Artist at the R.A.”, from The Daily Chronicle of 1904. Here the teen prodigy is already “devising a religion of my own” and describing a process of automatic writing and drawing some 15 years before Breton’s Las Champs Magnétiques. Through the course of the other pieces we learn that Spare was always “different”, a true outsider drawn into high society but unable, or unwilling, to operate by its norms or stomach its values.

Spare the man seems to have weathered the impoverished conditions of his later life with dignity and good humour it was the path he had chosen for himself. As is pointed out, his obvious talents would have made a lucrative position as a painter of society portraits a relatively straightforward proposition. Instead he made haunting, resonant studies of his fellow Southwark-dwellers, images that should really hang in the National Portrait Gallery.

The real tragedy of Spare, as expressed by Haydn Mackay in an obituary for his friend, is the loss to the nation’s artistic heritage: “How comes it about that our galleries can afford thousands of pounds for […] inferior examples of stranger contemporary artists, but could not find a fiver for a Spare during [his] lifetime?” With the exceptions of his WWI commissions at the Imperial War Museum and Wellcome Institute, and a handful of pieces at the Victoria & Albert, it is only thanks to the likes of Fulgur that his work can be seen publicly at all.

Fortean Times

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