A Prodigy at the Academy, a Recluse in the Pubs

Spare's life describes a deliberate fall through the English art world. At seventeen he had a drawing hung in the Royal Academy summer exhibition; he studied at the Royal College of Art, was talked of alongside Beardsley, showed at prestigious galleries, and published sumptuous books of his own drawings, The Book of Pleasure among them, whose draughtsmanship critics praised even when its doctrine baffled them. He worked as an official war artist at the end of the First World War. Then, decade by decade, he withdrew: from the West End to south London basements, from galleries to exhibitions hung in the saloon bars of pubs, where portraits of neighbours and film stars sold for a few pounds.

The withdrawal was partly temperament, partly poverty after his exhibitions of the later 1920s failed, and partly principle; he wrote that he preferred his sitters and buyers unpretentious. Bombed out in 1941 and losing the use of his drawing arm for a time, he recovered and kept working to the end, dying in 1956 with a final exhibition in preparation. The revival came posthumously and from an unexpected quarter: Kenneth Grant's books placed Spare at the centre of a magical current, the occult market made his pages valuable, and the art world eventually followed. The pub exhibitions now read less as decline than as a consistent aesthetic position, an artist practising his sorcery of images on the audience he actually wanted.