Austin Osman SPARE

The very large sheet may be dated to the early 1920s, when Spare produced a number of drawings of female nudes characterized by an uncompromising realism. A closely comparable large-scale pastel study of a crouching female nude seen from the front, signed and dated 1923 and of slightly smaller dimensions, is in a private collection

The model for many of Spare’s drawings of nudes of this period seems to have been a woman named Freda, of whom little else is known. Several nude studies of her appeared in the first few issues of a journal entitled The Golden Hind: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Literature, founded in 1922 and edited by Spare and the writer Clifford Bax, and issued in a large-scale folio format. As the artist’s biographer Phil Baker has noted, ‘The first issue of The Golden Hind appeared in October 1922, and included a large lithograph by Spare entitled ‘The New Eden’: Spare’s head, bat-winged, appeared in the sky over a realistically fleshy Freda, crouching naked near a coiled snake…As Bax remembered it, Spare “innocently filled our first number with…backviews of massive nude females”, and this caused their journal to be nicknamed The Golden Behind.’ The magazine lasted for just eight issues, and ceased publication in 1924. 

The present sheet also displays some similarities with a similar study of the back of a seated female nude, of vertical format and dated 19209. This was one of several similar drawings of female nudes used to illustrate Spare’s fourth book The Focus of Life, on which he worked for several years before its publication in 1921. Similar crouching figures also occur elsewhere in Spare’s work, such as a drawing entitled Metamorphosis of c.1926, which appeared at auction in London in 1994. As Baker writes, ‘Spare loved the flesh, perfect and imperfect, and among the idealised nudes there are other women who are more realistically naked. This was a lifelong tendency, increasing as he grew older and started to use elderly local women for models…His friend Dennis Bardens remarks that “His nudes were sometimes idyllic, sometimes earthy”…’