Austin Osman Spare: The man art history left behind – in pictures
Elephant and Castle's answer to Aubrey Beardsley and Salvador Dalí, Spare was an enfant terrible in Edwardian art circles but his stock plummeted and he faded into obscurity. Here, we take a look at some of his finest works
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Spare’s Portrait of the Artist (1907) shows him meditatively brooding over a table of imaginary bric-a-brac that reflects the contents of his mind
Photograph: Austin Osman Spare
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The Senseless Seven (1911), a self-portrait showing Spare’s kinship with the animal kingdom
Photograph: The Starlit Mire
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In The Death Posture and Preliminary Sensation Symbolised, both 1913, yoga and magical writing combine in an innovative attempt to visualise sensationPhotograph: The Book of Pleasure
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Despite its philosophical title, The Negation of Unity is Wisdom (1919) is about the breakup of Spare’s marriage
Photograph: Austin Osman Spare
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Solid flesh is lovingly rendered in pastel in Reclining Nude, from the 1920s
Photograph: Collection of Ossian Brown
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Coquette, from the early 1930s, brings out a foxy charm in Mary Pickford
Photograph: Collection of John Contreras
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A striking portrait of Joan Crawford (1933) from the art deco era
Photograph: Private collection
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This elegantly distorted Portrait of a Young Woman (1933) is from Spare’s Experiments in Relativity series – the title of which shows the Einsteinian jargon fashionable in the day
Photograph: Collection of Ossian Brown
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Spare uses characteristics of the god Pan to give a subtle twist to male faces – as in South London Satyr, from the early 1930s
Photograph: Private collection
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Forms emerge as line is unleashed in Spare’s Threshold of the Qliphoth: Drawn for Magical Conation (1955), an experiment in automatism
Photograph: Collection of Ossian Brown
