Austin Osman Spare: Artist and Sorcerer: Lecture by Phil Baker

Within an overview of Austin Osman Spare’s life, from Edwardian enfant terrible and “darling of Mayfair” to a largely forgotten man in a South London basement, this talk will consider the innovation and irreducible strangeness of his art, the crashing of his worldly fortunes, and his status as art history’s missing man. It will also consider his no less innovative career as an occult theorist and sorcerer of the unconscious, and look at the often bizarre degree to which he was mythologized as a sinister black magician through the 1970s and beyond. Along the way we shall meet Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Hitler, pub pianists playing the Harry Lime theme, and an amphibious owl with the wings of a bat.

The Speaker

Phil Baker’s books include Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (third expanded edition 2024) and City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley (2022), along with a cultural history of absinthe and a more academic book on Samuel Beckett. He has also introduced a comprehensive new edition of Dreams and How to Guide Them by the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys (1867; autumn 2025)