SPARE, Austin Osman. The Evolution of the Human Race
c.1928, pencil and wash on paper, 60 x 40cm, signed.
£ 7,000
60 x 40cm. Signed with initials to lower left and in full lower centre, pencil and green wash on paper. Framed.
This imposing composition in pencil, focused on the highly detailed animal and human bodies, as well as expressive faces, serves as a portrait of Walter Warren (1869–1942), the artist, gun engraver for Purdey and Sons, and an acquaintance of Spare since childhood. It was in the late 1920s, and near the creation of this drawing, that Spare also illustrated and helped Warren in the publication of The Youth and the Sage (1927). Spare’s use of clear, intricate lines is used in this drawing to represent the human figures and facial expressions, juxtaposed with the increasingly flowing and spontaneous lines that descend throughout the drawing. These clouds of line transform into the depiction of a monkey-like face, a cattle skull and, at the bottom, a number of reptiles and fish, evoking Spare’s ideas on evolution, possibly extending into past incarnations found within the unconscious mind of Warren’s dominant head.
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) ‘attracted patrons as an illustrator and bookplate designer, but was an enfant terrible at the Royal College of Art, where he was a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst. He left in 1905 without completing the course. The same year, aged eighteen, he published his first book, Earth: Inferno. His first West End showing at the Bruton Galleries in 1907 was widely condemned as unhealthy, and George Bernard Shaw is alleged to have said that ‘Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man’ (K. Grant, Images and oracles of Austin Osman Spare (1975), p.16). His early work is often compared to that of Aubrey Beardsley—a comparison of limited usefulness—and to that of the book illustrator E. J. Sullivan.’ (…) Spare increasingly parted company with fame and fortune during the 1920s, and between the wars he held selling exhibitions in his council flat. He drew intense pastels of Southwark locals from life, art deco pictures of film stars from magazines, and he experimented with anamorphic distortion, which he termed siderealism. Hitler tried to commission a portrait from him in 1936, but Spare refused.’ (ONDB)
Publications: Illustrated in Frank Letchford’s Austin Osman Spare: Michelangelo in a Tea Cup (2006); Robert Ansell The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin Osman Spare (Fulgur 2012), p.222, f.64, ‘c.1928, title unknown’.
Provenance: London, Christie’s South Kensington, May 12th 1994, lot 90.