Caves of Sorcerers:

The American Beginnings of Crowley's Art

by

William Breeze

Aleister Crowley was precocious in most things, but a late bloomer as an artist. He took up painting around his forty-third birthday, in late 1918. He had never studied are, but had long exposure to artists and their circles in Paris, London and later New York. He had moved in the expatriate artist circle centered on Le Chat Blanc café in Paris in the early years of the 1900s, a group that included the American sculptor Paul Bartlett (1865-1927), the Scottish painter Penrhyn Stanlaws (1865-1957), the Canadian painter J. W. Morrice (1865-1924), and his own brother-in-law Gerald Kelly (1879-1972)—later Sir Gerald Kelly, president of the Royal Academy. W. Somerset Maugham gave a fictionalised account of this milieu, with Crowley as the anti-hero, in his novel The Magician (1908). Crowley collaborated with Auguste Rodin, writing poetry to accompany Rodin's watercolours of nudes which were published as Rodin in Rime (1907). In London, he had his portrait drawn several times by Augustus John (1878-1961), dated artists and models—notably the sculptor Kathleen Bruce Scott (later Lady Kennett, 1878-1947)—and even ventured into criticism with the article 'Art in America' (The English Review, 1913), in which he opined that only Whistler and Sargent had real standing as American artists, with an honourable mention for Thomas Alexander Harrison, 'who once painted two quite passable pictures, by accident'. All, of course, were trained in France.

His earliest serious study of art dates to 1908, when he encountered Velázquez in the Prado. He recalled in his Confessions around 1922:

"Las Meninas is worshipped in a room consecrated solely to itself, and I spent more of my mornings in that room, and let it soak in. I decided then, and might concur still had I not learnt the absurdity of trying to ascribe an order to things which are each unique and absolute, that Las Meninas id the greatest picture in the world. It certainly taught me to know the one thing that I care to learn about painting: that the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for arranging forms and colours in such a way as to express the inmost self of the artist."

Crowley's arrival in America on Hallowe'en 1914 inspired a few newspaper articles and a flattering profile in the American edition of Vanity Fair recounting his exploits as a magician, mountaineer, explorer and poet, giving him a bare foothold of a reputation in the New World. But his five years in America would be largely marked by poverty and frustration, which he later claimed was part of his cover for his real mission as a British agent-of-influence working to infiltrate the German-controlled propaganda in New York to help bring America into World War I. He also came to view this arid period as the gestation of his magical personality: To Mega Therion, the Master Therion or The Beast 666. His one job—in fact, his first and last regular job—was his year as the editor of an avant-garde literary magazine, The International, from summer 1917 to summer 1918. He later told a visiting reporter.

"I have written forty books of poetry, among other things. There are some of my books on those shelves. But, somehow, I couldn't attain the desired expression in either prose or poetry. I chafed under the restraint of the pen. However, I probably would never have taken up painting if it hadn't been for The International, of which I became editor. I couldn't find artists who would draw the covers I wanted, do, finally, I became disgusted about fifteen months ago and decided to draw my own covers. I had never studied art and had never drawn or painted a picture in my life. When I tried to draw those covers I became so interested in the work that I gave up the editorship of the magazine and went in for art. What you see around you is the result."

Crowley had always had a natural gift as a graphic designer—some of his early self-published books are masterpieces of book art—but whatever designs he conceived for The International were executed by artists friends such as the Austrian-American writer-illustrator Helen Woljeska (c. 18187) or the Dutch painter Leon Engers (then known as Leon Engers Kennedy, 1890-1970). Crowley would later return to design by collaborating with his 'artistic executant' Frieda, Lady Harris (1877-1962) during World War II to create his Thoth Tarot deck, first published in The Book of Thoth (1944).

Soon after leaving The International he had an epiphany. His friends, the journalist and author William Seabrook (1884-1945) and his wife Kate, were Greenwich Village habitués, where they owned a café. Crowley lived nearby in a studio apartment at 1 University Place on the north side of Washington Square—much later an artist's landmark, the site of a bar-restaurant founded by Max's Kansas City owner Mickey Ruskin, known as Mickey's or One U by the artists who frequented it. Seabrook recalled that Crowley arrived home one day with canvases, brushed and tubes of oil paint and announced: 'My familiar spirits visited me in the night and commanded me to paint. I have been under the misapprehension that I was a great poet. Clearly I was mistaken. Paint is my real medium. I am destined to become one of the outstanding artists of any age.'

His early efforts were, however, not promising, Seabrook described them as 'the most awful smears you can imagine. The figures, arms, legs, torsos, faces are all "out of drawing" and the primary colors laid on with inconceivable crudity and glare.' It is possible that Crowley's colour sense had been permanently altered by years of experimentation with mescaline—he was a pioneer in its use as a psychedelic drug—which might explain his love of undiluted, vibrant colours, something that never entirely left him. Crowley told Seabrook: 'I began to be discouraged. I think my familiar spirits, my daemons, have something important to express through this medium—but they don't know the mechanics of painting. It's very unfair to me. And, if you don't mind. I think we had better run up to the Metropolitan Museum and take a look at Rembrandt's "old woman." ' They took the bus up Fifth Avenue to the Met, where Crowley spent hours studying the picture—probably Old Woman Cutting Her Nails, then recently donated and considered an important Rembrandt, though now believed to be by another artist. Crowley studied it first from a distance, then up close; he was frustrated that he could not touch the surface, as he did his own paintings. Seabrook reported that he was silent on the trip home. He then began to mix his paints rather than apply them straight from the tube, which Seabrook said 'hadn't occurred to him to do before', and practised line drawing with pencils and crayons.

In January 1919 Crowley found his muse, a Swiss-American schoolteacher from the Bronx, Leah Hirsig (1882-1975). He soon painted her, at her suggestion, as a 'Dead Soul', making her the centerpiece of a now-lost three-panel hinged screen. Crowley was greatly encouraged when the American painter Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930) came to view his triptych screen, recording in his Confessions that 'Bob Chanler came again and again to gaze and gloat. He brought everyone he knew to look at it. And even artists famous for their classical refinement had to admit its grisly power.' Chanler was a millionaire grandson of John Jacob Astor, and it may well have been a visit to Chanler's salon—an epicentre of upscale New York Bohemia—that inspired Crowley's sudden decision to turn to art, and make the radical lifestyle changes that ensued. Chanler had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1890s and returned to New York in 1902, specialising in painting screens, murals and room interiors for wealthy friends and patrons, though he also produced portraits, including one of Crowley: the Musée du Jeu de Paume held his Les Girafes (now in the Dépôt des Ouvrages d'Art de l'État, Ivry). His home, called the 'House of Fantasy', was described in a 1930 feature article in Time magazine: 'He bought three brownstone houses on East 19th Street, Manhattan, knocked them together and covered every inch of wall space with his own paintings. There were palm trees and parrots in the pantry, a dado of chimpanzees climb up the stairs, round the walls of the yellow dining room stalks a procession of tall Mexican goddesses with bird heads.' Chanler's circle of friends was wide, including for example Marcel Duchamp—both artists were included in the 1913 Armory Show—and his artistic theory was, like Crowley's overtly magical. The journalist and promoted Ivan Narodny wrote:

"According to Chanler, the origin of decorative art—and portrait painting—lies in the magic of the days before primitive man built a temple and created his gods. It was the idea of sorcery and spirits which inspired our barbaric ancestors to invent symbols, sacred designs, amulets, talismans, ikons and vestments for the occult or religious ceremonies. The idea of the spirit was intangible and could not be expressed in articulate words; therefore symbols were created and imaged drawn or carved. Out of those symbols and images evolved the folk arts. The caves of sorcerers were the forerunners of modern art studios."

In January 1919 Crowley moved across the park to a much larger studio on the third floor of 63 Washington Square South, on a block known as 'Genius Row' for its concentration of artists and writers; it featured a large expanse of windows looking north over the park and up Fifth Avenue. He furnished it lavishly, installed Leah Hirsig as his presiding muse, and set to work, often painting through the night until noon of the next day. When he had built up a body of work to show, he admitted the press.

On being asked by a reporter what sort of artist he was, he famously said: 'Oh, I don't know just what to call myself. I'd say, offhand, that I was an old master, because I'm a painter mostly of dead souls.'

Asked to classify his work, he replied:

Well, I don't know just what you'd call it. But please, whatever you do, don't call me a cubist or futurist or anything queer like that. I guess you might cal me a subconscious impressionist, or something on that order. My art really is subconscious and automatic. I'll tell you why. When I found I couldn't paint a portrait I didn't decide to go abroad and study for thirty or forty years. Instead, I walked up to a blank canvas one day and, standing very close to it, I placed the wet brush upon it and closed my eyes. I had no preconceived idea of what I was going to paint. My hand simply moved automatically over the canvas. I don't know how long I worked in that subconscious way, but you can imagine my astonishment when I found that I had painted a likeness of a friend whom I had not seen in many years. It was that person's dead soul I had painted. . . . All my work is done that way. I never know or have a preconceived idea of what is to appear on the canvas. My hand wanders into the realm of dead souls and very frequently the result is the likeness of some living person.

Automatic drawing was then in vogue in England; the English artists Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) and Frederick Carter (1883-1967) had recently published an article, 'Automatic Drawing', in their journal Form (1916). Crowley was assertive in his irrationalism—an essentially magical stance that was prescient in retrospect—freely allowing his works to express the illogic of dreams and visions. His 'subconscious impressionism' is not far removed from various Surrealist strategies, such as those detailed by Salvador Dali in his grimoire 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (1948).

Crowley continued his studio tour, describing various paintings that today may only survive as black-and-white photographs, showing off his wicked sense of humour in his discussions of their subjects and titles

"Now over there you see a weird looking lady with something resembling a pig. The title of that is Willa Wheeler Wilcox and the Swami. One of my best works, that. Of course, my impressions are not always those of well known people. That one over there on the east wall isn't a bad thing. That girl's head. It is entitled Young Bolshevik Girl with Wart Looking at Trotsky. That one with all the little figures? Oh, the name of that is A Day Dream of Dead Hats. You see, it shows a lady asleep on a veranda while the spirits of bygone bonnets pass across a mystic bridge on the heads of a dozen undressed ladies. You'll probably admit that most women when they take a nap dream of dead bonnets. "

One of Crowley's favourite paintings was of the American-born Franco-Russian actress Lottie Yorska (1879-1971). Known as Madame Yorska or simply Yorska, she was a protégée of Sarah Bernhardt who starred in David Hartford's lost 1919 film It Happened in Paris, and is still remembered today as the first Hollywood actress to get a nose job. It depicts a woman fallen backwards in death with a jewelled dagger protruding from her throat. Crowley explained:

"I got that impression at some affair given in Greenwich Village at which a certain violinist played. Mme. Yorska was there. The violinist, in rendering one striking piece, asked that the lights be turned low. While he was playing I saw Mme Yorska throw her head back and close her eyes. I carried the impression of that long white throat home with me. I tried to sleep but couldn't. During the night I got up, and going to the canvas, closed my eyes, and that picture was the result."

When asked about the dagger in the throat, he replied: "Oh, that long sweeping line of throat had to be cut somewhere and I couldn't think of any better way to cut a throat than with a dagger. So I stuck the knife into it. Rather good effect, I think."

Taking his reported to the screen triptych that had so excited Bob Chanler, Crowley explained:

"That large panelled screen is called the Screen of the Dead Souls. All those figures you see on it are dead souls in various stages of decomposition. That central figure in the middle panel is the queen of the dead souls. Of course you recognize the head looking over her shoulder. That's [William Randolph] Hearst. Over her other shoulder is Oscar Wilde. I don't know how he got in there, because I really hate him. The parrot sitting on the head of the dead lady's soul in the third panel is one that belongs to Bob Chanler. The screen is a fair example of my subconscious art. It was done like the pictures, with no preconceived idea."

Apparently, asked if he had studied art, or planned to, he replied: "Study art? Never have and never intend to."

Crowley tried to mount an exhibition at a major Fifth Avenue gallery without success—he was deemed too 'dangerous and disreputable'. He then approached the Liberal Club, another epicentre of New York Bohemia with premises on MacDougal Street. Swayed by the Vanity Fair article that had appeared some years earlier, the club members set aside their misgivings about Crowley's doubtful reputation and agreed to mount a show.

According to Seabrook: 'The Liberal Club was impressed. "So," said its members, "this Crowley is evidently a great man, Poe and Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire] and a lot of other great men were not what they should have been morally, but what's that got to do with art? Let us by all means exhibit Crowley's pictures." ' But the show closed so quickly it failed to garner any reviews. Seabrook described this as:

"a surprising climax, not without its element of savage, Rabelaisian humor. . . . It was generally understood that Crowley's paintings were 'symbolic.' Near high-brows and dilettante old ladies, adjusting their monocles and lorgnettes, gazed in astonishment at the canvases. Finding ordinary adjectives inadequate, they would end by exclaiming knowingly, 'Oh how symbolic.' But what they were symbolic of no one ventured to suggest. . . . Crowley himself was there, vastly tricked out in a lemon-colored waistcoat with agate button2, English knickers, tasselled brogues, and a shaven head that made him look like a Buddhist priest, or a Bayswater convict—whichever you please."

Crowley gave an innocuous explanation of the symbolism of one painting, May Morn. But one of the board members of the Liberal Club came across a newly published issue of Crowley's journal The Equinox which reproduced May Morn with its 'initiated' interpretation, and reportedly said:

"This man, Aleister Crowley, is a monster, a blasphemer, an abomination. He is trying to destroy everything that is sacred and holy—and these pictures of his, apparently innocent, are, in reality, the hideous, veiled propaganda of his wicked cult. You heard the glib lying explanation he gave of the picture called May Morn. Now listen to the real interpretation of that picture, written by the man himself, for his equally depraved initiated. . . . 'This picture is symbolic of the New Aeon. From the blasted stump of dogma, the poison oak of Original Sin, is hanged the hag with dyed and bloody hair, Christianity. The satyr, a portrait of Brother D.D.S. [George Cecil Jones], one of the teachers of the Master Therion, represents the Soul of the New Aeon, whose word is "Do what thou wilt." The shepherd and the nymph in the background represent the spontaneous outburst of the music of sound and motion, caused by the release of the Children of the New Aeon.' "

While the board of the Liberal Club was not unanimous, the show was promptly taken down.

W. Somerset Maugham published his novel The Moon and Sixpence in the summer of 1919. It was reviewed by the New York Times on 3 August, and Crowley would have read it promptly. Its protagonist Charles Strickland was, like Crowley, an English expatriate who discovered his vocation for art in his forties. Strickland sets off for a foreign land, far from cold, grey England, to give free rein to both his sexual and aesthetic impulses, lovingly painting the walls of his foreign abode. This clearly resonated for Crowley, who made the connection that the rather clueless Times reviewer missed: that Strickland was loosely based on Paul Gauguin. Crowley therefore proclaimed Gauguin a saint of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (the Gnostic Catholic Church of the O.T.O.).

Crowley left New York in December 1919, briefly visiting England, settling in Fontainebleau while deciding where to put down roots. He decided on Cefalù, Sicily, where he rented a small 'villa'—which was really more of a rustic farmhouse on a hillside—in the spring of 1920. It would be Crowley's paintings on the walls, doors and shutters at the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily that would first draw worldwide attention to his art. It is ironic that, aside from a door and several sets of shutters in private collections and that of the O.T.O., only suggestive ruins survive of the Abbey today. Its decay appears to have proceeded in inverse proportion to the ascent of Crowley's reputation as a serious artist.

Part of the regimen for new inductees into the Abbey of Thelema was to spend a period of time in one room, completely painted, which he called the Chambre des Cauchemars. Its vivid, grotesque and disturbing images were designed to bring neophytes face to face will all of their unexamined, unconsciously absorbed value-judgements, which Crowley believed bound their true selves in a rigid mould of conformity.

The intent was to shock and disorient, and shock and disorient it did—indeed, the Chambre is still shocking the good citizens of Cefalù today. But Crowley's students came through their ordeals unscathed and the better for it; the pictures, in the end, became pictures. The Cefalù experiment in immersion psychology has been held up repeatedly as the pinnacle of evil and depravity, which is ironic, as Crowley was using a comparatively mild form of psychological disorientation, a technique since refined to a black art by governments in order to interrogate spies and detainees.

In 1923, Crowley dictated a series of brief notes giving his views on reactions of people to his paintings, recast into notes by his secretary, Norman Mudd (1889-1934): "Can't judge unless a lot seen and for a time.' He then outlines what he believes to be the progressive stages of a new viewer's reaction to his paintings: '1. Surprised. 2. Revolted. 3. Puzzled. 4. Irritated. 5. Fascinated."

Visitors to the present show might compare his theory to their own reactions.

Then, referring to the Abbey in Cefalù, he notes the reaction of those who actually live with his paintings: 'People who have lived in house for 3 [months or years] not tired. Go into Cauchemar[s] for 40,000 time[s] to see the pictures.' This is confirmed by the fortunate few who possess Crowley paintings today; they never cease to fascinate.

Crowley turned to landscape and serious portraiture at Cefalù, having largely outgrown the leg-pulling satirical painting of his New York period. His output in this period, roughly 1920-2, includes the paintings in the present exhibition.

In November 1929 Crowley scheduled a show in London at his publishers, the Mandrake Press—a small, courageous imprint that openly invited police action by showing the art of another of their authors, D. H. Lawrence. Although invitations were printed, and he worked up a list of the 142 works he had available, it was cancelled. The only major show in his lifetime was held in 1931 by the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf and the arts association Porza in Berlin, with seventy-three works. From surviving lists, letters and photographs, Crowley is known to have produced about 300 works, but only a fraction of these have survived. The religious order Ordo Templi Orientis—which Crowley led, and to which he willed his estate on his death—mounted a posthumous show in 1988 at the October Gallery, London, made possible by the generosity of Kenneth Anger, Jimmy Page and other private collectors who made forty-one works available.

More recently, Marco Pasi, working with Giuseppe Di Liberti, brought to light an important previously unknown collection of Crowley paintings that shows the artist at the height of his powers, and at his most serious and compelling.

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