Austin Osman Speer’s drawings illustrate an abundance of distractions – ARTnews.com

When he died in 1956, British artist Austin Osman Speer was completely forgotten by the Cognoscenti who once hailed him as the best painter of his generation. His early work has been compared favorably with Aubrey Beardsley’s intricate ink illustrations. But his later travels in ritual magic and astrology, exemplified by the grimoires that he published, may marginalize his career. The subtitle of a 2012 autobiography describes him as “London’s Lost Artist”.

The exhibition Sexual Psychopathy, recently shown at the Iceberg Projects in Chicago, was Spear’s first solo exhibition in North America. It was a particularly scathing appearance amid the spurring warnings and physical terror caused by the pandemic of our moment. Named after German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study on sexual pathology, the show featured a sheet of forty-four untitled pencil drawings illustrating an abundance of aberrations–bestiality, urination, pee, the name of your pleasure–along with Stock-in-trade is like a tongue. The newspaper was acquired by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in 1963, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and it has remained undisclosed until now.

There is speculation that an odd pair commissioned the business in the early 1920s. The result shows an array of fictional characters: satyrs, horned men, characters caught between races or species, terrifying rod-shaped creatures. The human corpses in spear work are too mature and unpolished. They occupy a vacant space indistinguishable from interior or landscape spaces, although remnants of erased lines are sometimes visible. A mysterious atmosphere of the epidemic reigns, confirmed by carcinogenic faces and copious runoff of semen, vomit, feces and urine. If Speer’s erotic vignettes recall those of precursors such as Belgian icon Felicien Robes, Hungarian painter Mihaly Zichy, and French painter Martin van Miel, his focus on excretion and physical decline is unique in its extreme.

All this ghost is full of vitality. Spear’s characters are dirty revelers, captive gluttons, and ardent thieves, daring the viewer to condemn their clan. In one graphic, three deformed golem-like creatures urinate on a lustful woman lounging below. Her eyes are closed in taste, and meandering streams of urine form a kind of substrate around her. It appears to have been imported from Rubens’ canvas, as if Speer was upsetting the art’s historical beauty standards. Similarly, in another drawing, a Spear-like person – with his trademark shaggy hair – is bent over, defecating on two characters preoccupied with his sense of masturbation.

The Spur line has a linear, vivid finesse that blurs the distinction between clothing, bodies, and bodily fluids. The figures disintegrate and merge, as in another drawing in which a mass of destroyed faces reminiscent of the caricatures of Hürrik Dumir swells towards the winged vagina that sails over the head. This jock of men is presented with such gestural strength that it could be an example of Speer’s auto-drawing, where lines sway frantically.

The corruption sequence is temporarily smoothed out in a grid of nine drawings depicting either couples or solo actors. These photos look totally modern, even when they hint, however saucy, of romantic idealism. In one scene, a man stands with his hand behind his head, imitating an ancient statue, while a graceful woman clings to it. The huge penis of a man pierces her, although the mood is not sexual. It’s as if the couple’s genitals are engaged in their own mindless errands. Throughout these drawings there is a feeling of appropriating instinct, figures who comfort themselves in every imaginable way, sometimes experiencing pleasure, other times only fulfilling a boring commitment to material necessities. This wild and astounding display was as much an illustration of physical satisfaction as it was an exercise in excitementDesire, disgust, pity, and strife.