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Subtitled "The Life And Legend of London's Lost Artist" A paperback edition of the acclaimed, engaging biography of this important yet neglected British artist. Includes many rare illustrations and 8 pages of colour plates, with an introduction by Alan Moore, the acclaimed graphic novelist.
Book Details
Publisher:
TURNAROUND PUBLISHER SERVICES
Publication Date:
05-Jul-2012
ISBN:
9781907222115
Guardian review
Austin Osman Spare by Phil Baker review
the guardian Tue 25 September 2012
The Edwardian artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare could be the missing link between Aubrey Beardsley and Jimmy Page. An enigmatic self-portrait now in the collection of the Led Zeppelin guitarist depicts the artist sitting at a table covered in necromantic bric-a-brac, which, as Baker observes, "is like peering into the window of some faintly hellish junk shop". Baker has a fine store of anecdotes one warms to Spare serving Aleister Crowley a cake of baked horse-dung, claiming it to be "an old T'ang dynasty recipe" though he has a harder time elucidating Spare's baffling self-invented religion. What emerges is a portrait of a marginal figure forever ahead of the curve: he's cited as the precursor of surrealism, pop art and even psychoanalysis, though Spare dismissed Freud and Jung as "Fraud and Junk". It's fascinating to imagine what they would have made of a man whose views of the subconscious were formed by the magically summoned manifestation of a giant owl.