Welcome to 3 Minute Art History.
I'm Mead McLean.
Today's Lesson: Austin Osman Spare.
As best I can figure, Austin Osman Spare [30 December 1886 - 15 May 1956] was the first
Surrealist.
The word didn't really exist when he was starting out, but he was already doing work that dealt
with the same subjects in a similar way.
I don't think he gets grouped with them because he was and is too weird.
He started out going to the Royal College of Art, and his dad submitted a couple of
his early works to the Royal Academy Summer Show, which gave him some early notoriety.
At a young age, he met a witch who introduced him to a personal style of magic, which he
developed into Chaos Magic, wherein a practitioner writes a statement of intent, converts it
into a sigil or image, meditates until the mind silences, then destroys the sigil, forgetting
it afterwards.
His most developed images are his Sidereal Portraits.
He would take printed images of celebrities, look at them at an angle, then paint them
on this angle.
The effect is as if they were pulled and distorted, yet retain the dimensionality he was able
to create with his academic background.
During World War I, he was assigned to draw images of the battlefields.
Having survived that, he came back to the UK, where he lived a modest to poor existence,
keeping open house in his flat and selling drawings for as little as 2GBP.
He published a text called Automatic Drawing in 1916, but was doing automatic drawings
as early as 1900.
The technique was either picked up or discovered independently by the Surrealists a bit later.
Andre Breton published The First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, where he mentions automatic
writing.
The idea of the technique is to turn off one's conscious mind, allowing the hand to draw
freely without influence.
As the marks are made, certain images appear and are then developed into more polished
images or figures.
Spare wrote of waking up at nights with his hand moving over his sketchbook, drawing while
asleep, perhaps for hours.
AOS certainly deserves some attention, particularly
if you're interested in the Occult, Surrealism, or Experimental music.
He's been an influence on artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Psychic TV, Val Denham,
and Genesis P. Orridge.
My name is Mead McLean, and this has been 3 Minute Art History.