Beschreibung:

Austin Osman Spare (1888-1956) pencil and coloured pencils on thin wove paper 'Threshold: Quasi-automatic drawings. 1944-1945' title page in the original album with attached note '35 drawings by A.O.S. Bought for £15. Nov 15th 1945 through Hannen Swaffer' 8 x 13in. Estimate £700-1,000 LOTS 1087 - 1115 FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION IN EASTBOURNE An introduction by Dr William Wallace an acknowledged authority on the life and work of the artist and author of The Catalpa Monographs: A Critical Survey of the Art and Writings of Austin Osman Spare - Jerusalem Press, 2015 AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE (1886-1956) SKETCHBOOK OF 35 DRAWINGS The suite of fine drawings by Spare offered here for sale represent sketchbook works but of accomplished presentation drawing standard, and represent one of his usages for this medium, permitting his inspiration to unspool sequentially onto the pages from his restlessly combinatory imagination. He is unusual amongst artists, in that he was prepared to sell his sketchbooks; these are usually retained by artists as containing germinal ideas for more resolved works. Whilst Spare also did this he was not possessive about them, and at times they were extensions of his own published occult-philosophical works. Good, early examples include the exquisite mystical bookworks in ink and watercolour The Focus of Life & The Papyrus of Amen-AOS (1905-6) and The Arcana of AOS & the Consciousness of Kia-Ra (1906), developing ideas from his first published book Earth:Inferno (1905), both sold to his friend and mentor, the avid collector, Pickford Waller (1873-1927), possibly in the hope of publication. This was only realized in 2011 as Two Grimoires which succinctly conveys their magical nature. The title The Focus of Life would be invoked again by Spare for his published oneiric odyssey and masterwork of 1921 Spare was again selling sketchbooks by 1924, and again to Waller with Satyros at Stroud, a mythologised vision of the Gloucestershire landscape in pencil, coloured pencil and watercolour, produced on holiday far from the fleshpots of the Boro'; 'Satyros' being one of the artist's alter-egos. His accompanying letter to Waller is upbeat, Spare having been bucked by the sale of four drawings to Lord Leverhulme. Two other sketchbooks of that year have since been part-published, the sublime Ugly Ecstasy, with its grotesque, Baudelairean vision of beauty, bought by Gerald Reitlinger (1900-1976), and The Valley of Fear: Metamorphosis, with its Sherlockian title (Spare loved detective stories), another Waller acquisition. Another, (1925;published 1972), A Book of Automatic Drawings, is actually quasi-automatic, with more finely finished grotesquerie Overall, the sketchbooks vary, from the type of fluent ludic outpourings of the automatics, to finely finished sequences verging on discreet narrative as in an unfolding journey, to more didactic sketchbooks intended as instructive for students of his Austin Osman Spare School of Draughtsmanship. Others contain preparatory drawings for larger pastel paintings and other work, and even, as with one owned by his great friend and amanuensis Frank Letchford (1916-1998), a combined sketch/scrapbook with pieces collaged over full-paged drawings of c.1954 Several notable sketchbooks, including types (drawings) here offered at auction were produced whilst the artist was "fire-spotting" for flying bombs over his beloved Southwark. One such, (recently published) consists of 24 highly finished drawings, entitled: Adventures in Limbo, obliquely recalling the Dantean influence of the 1905 Earth:Inferno. Spare, like Blake, viewed London as both (literally and metaphorically) as both concrete and spiritualised as well as charged with mystery. In Dante's Limbo, the poet in wonder sees the noble pagans later revered by Spare: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Thales, Zeno (of Cittium), and Dioscorides. The artist was to reveal tellingly in his 'Mansion House' pub