Date: Sunday, October 17, 2021
Time: 3 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 1 pm EST the day of the lecture.

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Forgotten and famous at the same time, Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) is now a cult figure, much mythologized since his death. Controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, but instead, he fell out of the West End art scene and went underground, living in poverty and obscurity in South London. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.

Phil Baker’s groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare’s art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the mainstream art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, twentieth-century alchemists and gigantic owls.

Richly readable and illuminating, it takes us deep into the strange inner world that this most enigmatic of artists inhabited, shedding new light while allowing just a few shadowy corners to flourish unspoiled.

Phil Baker's books include Austin Osman Spare, The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, a biography of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil is a Gentleman, and critical works on Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs. He lives in London.

Viktor Wynd is an artist, author, lecturer, and impresario. He operates The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History as part of The Last Tuesday Society, which hosts London’s longest-running independent literary salon and has hosted over 500 lectures since 2005, from household names to unpublished obsessives.