{occult} – Page 103 – { feuilleton }

Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

Another Internet Archive discovery, this is a scanned copy of one of Austin Spare’s first illustrated works. Behind the Veil was a small book of mystical fiction by Ethel Rolt Wheeler, published in 1906. Spare was only 20 at the time and the drawings, while accomplished, lack the finesse of his later work. They also owe a lot more to Beardsley’s style than his later drawing (with some figurative nods to Michelangelo, perhaps) which isn’t so surprising given that Beardsley’s influence, eight years after his death, was still considerable.

Also in the archives are two more Spare commissions of lesser interest: Twelve Poems (1916) and The Gold Tree (1917), both by JC Squire.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

William Blake in Manchester

Europe: A Prophecy by William Blake (1794).

Two exhibitions based around the work of William Blake open today at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, “organised to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth as well as the 200th anniversary of the Parliamentary abolition of the transatlantic slave trade” and Blake’s Shadow: William Blake and his Artistic Legacy. The latter seems to be the more interesting of the two.

Blake’s Shadow: exhibition summary

This exhibition explores Blake’s continuing fascination for artists, filmmakers and musicians. It features around sixty watercolours, prints and paintings in addition to numerous illustrated books and a range of audio-visual material. Blake is a unique figure in British visual culture, attracting both academic and popular interest. In the years since his death in 1827, Blake has continued to influence the world of creativity and ideas. He has inspired people with such wide ranging interests as literature, painting, book design, politics, philosophy, mythology through to music and film making. Alongside works by Blake—prints, watercolours, engravings and book illustrations—the exhibition spans two centuries of his influence.

• His contemporaries in the late 18th and early 19th century are represented with works from John Flaxman, Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, J.H. Fuseli and Thomas Stothard
• Blake’s influence on artists in the Victorian period is explored through works by Ford Madox Brown, Walter Crane, Frederic Shields, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Soloman and G.F. Watts.
• British artists working in the 20th and 21st century include Cecil Collins, Douglas Gordon, Paul Nash, Anish Kapoor, David Jones, Ceri Richards, Patrick Proctor, Austin Osman Spare and Keith Vaughan. This section of the exhibition features photographs and original works.
• From the 1960s onward, writers, musicians, film makers like Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison of The Doors and John Lennon have adopted Blake as a mystical seer and anti-establishment activitist. More latterly, as British musicians and activists like Billy Bragg and Julian Cope have grappled with notions of national identity, Blake has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Blake’s Shadow examines this more recent influence as evidenced in work by the filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, and various musicians, notably Patti Smith and Jah Wobble.

The Dawn by Austin Spare (no date).

It’s good to see Austin Spare being included in something like this. He always referred to Blake as an influence but, as I’ve mentioned before, he’s frequently been treated disrespectfully by an art establishment that doesn’t know what to make of the occult basis of his work.

Mind Forg’d Manacles runs to 6 April 2008, Blake’s Shadow to 20 April.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Austin Spare in Glasgow
• Tygers of Wrath
• Austin Osman Spare

Austin Spare in Glasgow

Austin Spare

Self-portrait by Austin Osman Spare (1907).

A late discovery but worth a mention, an Austin Spare exhibition that’s been running in Glasgow this month. From the press release:

An exhibition of 13 prints from this great artist and Occultist will run until 29th September 2007 at Mono, King’s Court, King Street Glasgow.

We have a diverse array of his styles to exhibit, and some of these have never been exhibited publicly before. We begin in 1921 with “The Magic Circle”, through his renowned “Ugly Ecstasy” drawings of 1924 (3 drawings & Grotesque), a demonic watercolour featuring a three headed demon?one of whose heads is Cthulhu, a postcard with drawing of his friend the bohemian writer Oswell Blakeston as Satyr and message about his art show on the reverse, “Self Portrait as Satyr” significantly signed ZOSAOS, a sidereal pastel entitled “Dire Awakening”, a watercolour which depicts a kind of celestial phallus endowing the receiver with “ecstasy” and a lambent woman, “Punch and Judy”, “The Return” and ending with “The Death Mask of Voltaire”—painted two years before the artist’s death, and being a meditation on death itself.

As our opening night of the exhibition show was so popular and created so much interest, we are thinking of having an end-of-exhibition get together to discuss Zos and the effect it’s had on people, so if Zos has inspired you, let me know or leave a message on our MySpace at myspace.com/23enigmashop and we’ll let you where and when.

We have produced a catalogue to mark this unique occasion in Scottish occulture and to honour the memory of AOS/ZOS. The catalogue is a folio containing a three page essay on Zos, specially written for us and kindly donated by Michael Staley. The 13 artworks from our exhibition have been expertly reproduced, and photographic quality prints made. These are all included in the catalogue, we also have a range of t-shirts, a set of 13 postcards of the prints from the exhibition and individual full scale prints for sale which are truly stunning.

Via Midian Books.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If only they knew what was coming…

The picture above is a still from Kenneth Anger’s 2002 film of Crowley’s paintings which you can see in two parts at YouTube. The paintings were filmed in exhibition at the October Gallery in 1998 and Anger turns the original tabloid headline around by making the “hang” refer to hanging a painting. Crowley’s crude artwork often turns up in books but there are several pictures in the film I hadn’t come across before. Crowley’s depiction of the Himalayas, where he spent some time mountaineering, look very similar to those of Nicholas Roerich, the painter whose work HP Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. It would have been nice to have some more information about the pictures but that’s not Anger’s style.

• The Man We Want to Hang pt 1 | pt 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Strange cargo: things found in books

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).

One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The Other Andrew’s page concerned book inscriptions, something any book collector will be used to seeing. Less common are the objects which slip from the pages when you’ve returned home. There are several categories of these.

1: Bookmarks

I have a substantial collection of bookmarks proper, from embossed strips of leather to the more mundane pieces of card of the type that bookshops frequently give away. But I also make a habit of using odd inserts to mark a place as did the previous owners of these volumes. The City Lights book (above) came with a very fragile leaf inside it which may well be as old as the book. Another City Lights book I own, the Artaud Anthology from 1965, included a newspaper article about Artaud. Newspaper clipping inserts are discussed below.

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