Borough Satyr

Essential purchase: Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare, available from Fulgur, who don't seem to want you to copy and paste their images... so here's one of his automatic drawings from this post at Monster Brains instead.

See more at The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus, a blog you really should be following.

There's no shortage of unjustly neglected artists, but even so I find it astonishing that Spare is so little-known outside of occultist circles (I have to admit I was entirely ignorant of his work until fairly recently). It isn't all that difficult to fit him into the conventional art historical narrative, either as a proto-Surrealist or a post-Beardsley decadent type. And his relatively conventional portraits, several of which can be seen in Borough Satyr, are spectacularly accomplished.

From BBC2's otherwise largely excruciating The Culture Show, here's Alan Moore on Austin Osman Spare. It looks like Phil Baker's biography of Spare should be out soon.