|
Aleister Crowley in Cefalu: The Works from the Palermo Collection
by
Marco Pasi
During his student years at the University of Cambridge, Crowley was in contact with artistic circles, and so, from a young age, was in a position to form personal opinions about the trends and movements of his time. In his autobiography he recalls discovering Symbolism and the Decadent artists then in fashion, such as Felicien Rops and Aubrey Beardsley. In that same period he made the acquaintance of Gerald F. Kelly, a young English painter who would complete his career at the heart of the British artistic establishment as president of the Royal Academy. Like many other young artists of that era, Kelly moved to Paris. There he introduced Crowley, who frequently stayed in Paris at that time, to society, in particular to a group of young Anglo-American artists who met regularly at a Montparnasse cafe, Le Chat Blanc. Among them were the American sculptor Paul Bartlett, the Canadian painter J. W. Morrice and the Scottish painter Penrhyn Stanlaws. The English author W. Somerset Maugham was also a member of this group; he describes it in the first chapters of his novel The Magician (1908), in which one of the main characters, the fiendish Oliver Haddo, is modelled on Crowley. During this period Crowley was thus able to meet, among others, Auguste Rodin, for whom he wrote a series of poems.
If Crowley no longer had the chance to visit artistic circles regularly after this phase of his life, it is nonetheless clear that he always followed closely developments in the art world; for example, his 1913 article 'Art in America' offered a critical outline of the state of art in the United States. It is also worth noting that his disciples included painters who may be considered minor, but who today have a following. Among them one can name the English Austin Osman Spare, the American Leon Engers (known also as Leon Engers Kennedy, the creator of one of the best-known portraits of Crowley, kept today at the National Portrait Gallery in London), and the Argentine Alejando Xul Solar (painter of another important Crowley portrait). In spite of his movements in artistic circles, Crowley did not undertake his first experiments in painting until relatively late, towards 1918, when he was living in the United States. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Crowley left his native England.
His stay in America, which only ended after the war's ends, was a period of spiritual and material crisis. Having squandered during his youth a considerable fortune inherited from his family, Crowley often found himself in extremely straightened financial circumstances.
Increasingly convinced that he was a spiritual master in possession of a message of primary importance for humanity, he did not, during this period, succeed in creating a stable group of disciples. Efforts to promote his literary career were also uncrowned with by success, even if head pieces published regularly in magazines and newspapers. It seems, therefore, that discovering painting gave him a way to reshape his career, to escape the dead end into which he felt he had stumbled. Several newspaper interviews of the time seem to confirm this. What is certain, though, is that right from the start of his experiments with the medium, painting took on a considerable importance in Crowley's life, and that this importance lasted at least until the 1930s.
As William Breeze recalls, Crowley's activities as a painter began in 1918. Among the rare works which is also one of Crowley's best-known paintings. By 1919 Crowley was already able to organise in New York's Greenwich Village his first one-man show, which made somewhat of a splash in local newspapers. During this American period, he made sure to distance himself from the artistic avant-gardes of the time, such as Cubism or Futurism, presenting himself rather as a 'subconscious impressionist'. This label was supposed to describe his method of working, which rejected in principle any rational or technical element, leaving instead a great deal to automatic reflex and the outpourings of the unconscious mind. On the other hand, he insisted on the importance of primitive art, uncivilised, free of the corrupting influence of schools and academies, and liberated from any fossilised technique. In this sense, he felt that his being self-taught was in no way a handicap, but rather an advantage.
Several months after his exhibition in New York, Crowley left the United States to return to Europe. He now had a new project to carry out: the creation of an 'Abbey of Thelema', a spiritual school in which his disciples would live with their master in a communal setting. He found an ideal spot on the Sicilian coast, in the small town of Cefalų. This experiment in occult communal living lasted for three years before Crowley was expelled from Italy by Mussolini. The three years at Cefalų represent a period of relative calm in Crowley's life, and one of the mist fruitful from a literary, if not artistic, viewpoint. It was during this period that Crowley painted a large number of his works, including those that make up the Palermo Collection. At the same time, he decorated his entire bedroom (which he meaningfully named the 'Chamber of Nightmares') with murals, as well as some of the walls of the villa's communal living rooms. A fraction of these murals are still visible today in spite of the damage caused by time and neglect.
It is also during this period that his style and technique became clearer. One of the major sources of inspiration for his work is Gauguin's painting. Richard Kaczynski has drawn attention to the fact that Crowley's interest in Gauguin most likely was stimulated by his reading The Moon and the Sixpence (1919), a novel by his former companion in Montparnasse's Bohemia, W. Somerset Maugham. Gauguin's influence seems even to have become in time a real obsession, such that Crowley eventually elevated the French painter to the ranks of the saints of his 'Gnostic Church'. It is easy to understand Crowley's fascination with Gauguin; his appeal went beyond the artistichis very life and ideas were inspiring. Apart from any 'spiritual' or 'mystical' component which several historians have wanted to glimpse in Gauguin's work, what fascinated Crowley above all about the French painter was his anti-academicism and his more or less scathing criticism of Western civilisation, which he contrasted with the simplicity and naturalness certain 'exotic' cultures have been able to preserve. Moreover, it was just around the end of the First World War, when there was widespread disillusionment concerning the so-called blessings and progress of Western civilisation; this aspect of Gauguin's work began to be appreciated not just by critics, but by an increasingly wide public. The wildalmost rawway of painting that Crowley adopted can be put down to a deliberate choice, and has more importance than a simple lack of technical ability. Cefalų was for Crowley what Tahiti was for Gauguin, His idea to paint the Abbey's interiors (including doors and shutters) was clearly inspired by the way Gauguin painted his Tahitian hut, but with this difference: for Crowley, the murals in the Chamber of Nightmares had a clear initiatory and psychagogic function. Gauguin's influence, and probably that of other post-Impressionists, also shows up more formally in Crowley's highly vivid color palette and relative absence of subtle shades.
His expulsion from Italy in 1923 put an end to this period of tranquility and creative happiness. Crowley's activity as a painter was naturally affected. The lack of stability and financial resources posed difficulties for him but evidently did not prevent him from continuing to paint. In 1931, during a prolonged stay in Germany (where a large number of his disciples lived), he had another exhibition, this one much more significant than the New York show. It was mounted at one of the most prominent galleries of Weimar Germany, Karl Nierendorf's Galerie Porza, where many Expressionist artists had shown their work. It was a Mecca for what the Nazis called entartete Kunst, or degenerate art (a definition which they could have easily applied to Crowley's canvases); like other German artistic establishments it would have a difficult time after the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933. This exhibition marks the summit of Crowley's artistic career, even if from a commercial point of view it proved to be an absolute failure. Nonetheless, the exhibition aroused some interest from the press, doubtless thanks more to the eccentricity of the person exhibiting than to the artistic merit attributed to his work.
Once he came back to England in 1932, Crowley would never again leave his native land. During this last period of his life he still occasionally drew and painted, and a good many works from this period have survived. The last great artistic project that he completed, during the years 1938 through 1942, is the creation of his tarot, the Thoth Tarot. In this new deck the symbolism of the cards, while preserving the basic structure of the traditional tarots, was profoundly revised, largely inspired by his magical doctrine. During its preparation, he also wrote a monograph [The Book of Thoth] presenting his personal interpretation of the tarot and explaining the significance and symbolic value of each card.
In reality, as we will see, the Thoth Tarot was not Crowley's first foray into revising the tarot's imagery according to the pattern of his doctrine. Thanks to the discovery of the Palermo Collection, it has now become clear that while in Cefalų he was already attempting to give form to some of these ideas, for he painted a small series of cards on wood. We do not know precisely how many cards were produced, but three paintings in the Palermo Collection are from this series. It is interesting to note that Crowley did not choose, in the following years, to continue his project. Possibly it was due to a lack of time (a complete tarot deck is made up of seventy-eight cards) or to the financial problems discussed earlier. But there is another side to it, one that sheds light on Crowley's relationship with his artistic creation. For the Thoth deck Crowley did not directly engage with painting the images himself, but instead gave the task of Frieda, Lady Harris (1877-1962), an English artist whom he met towards the end of the 1930s who had become his disciple.
While in his paintings Crowley sought to develop an artistic means of self-expression, which would eventually add to his magical and esoteric side and sometimes even overtake it, it is obvious Crowley felt that he should give the tarot images a 'neutral' form which would not get in the way of their use in meditation. Frieda Harris was easily able to meet the demands of maintaining neutrality while allowing immediate access to the symbolic content of the cards.
The correspondence between Crowley and Harris during the preparation of the tarot shows how their collaboration worked, and it is noticeable that Crowley closely followed the execution of the deck. The subjects, composition, and extremely meticulous choice of colours: all were decided by Crowley, as each element served as a foundation of the esoteric message that each card was meant to communicate, and Harris faithfully carried out the instructions received from her master. According to Crowley, the tarot in its entirety offered a complete picture of the basic aspects of the universe, and was intended more for meditation than for divination.
The production of his tarot deck would be, from an artistic point of view, Crowley's swan song, as he died in 1947 before seeing it published. Today it is one of the most widely sold decks in the world, and is often used by people who are not necessarily interested in either Crowley's magical system or his religion of Thelema. Its success bears witness to Crowley's creative and aesthetic prowess, which is often compromised in his paintings.
If Crowley's artistic output is considered in its entirety, it is noticeable that his works can be ordered roughly into three categories. First there are the symbolic or visionary paintings, which often contain esoteric themes. The interpretation of these paintings often turns out to be highly complex, and requires a deep knowledge of Crowley's magico-religious doctrines. The tarot cards are clearly part of this category. Next are the portraits, which are mainly of friends and acquaintances. Lastly, there are the landscapes, which during the Cefalų period often reproduce the wild beauty of Sicilian nature. From time to time the boundaries between these categories is blurred, as Crowley frequently painted landscapes with symbolic or visionary traits, but these distinctions can be useful for merely practical purposes.
Paintings from the Palermo Collection leave us with a highly vivid image of Crowley's work during the Cefalų period, and they considerably expand our knowledge of his artistic development. A good many of his works are signed and dated, and go back to 1920, the beginning of his Sicilian experience. Some are mentioned in Crowley's diary of the time, which allows us to identify them and eventually to better understand their content. In certain cases, however, the diary mentions are highly enigmatic. This is the case, for example, with one of the most interesting works in the collection, Cock and Snake. Here is what Crowley wrote about this painting on 6 June 1920:
The 'hexagram' clearly refers to the I Ching, the Chinese oracle which Crowley regularly used and which was also at the root of his choice of Cefalų as a place of residence. The notes in the journal hint that the question was linked to money (the lack of which constantly haunted Crowley). The two animals represented in the painting, the cock and the snake, are extremely complicated and polysemous in the Western iconographic tradition, but it is difficult to avoid seeing in the image a reference to Abraxas (or Abrasax), the divine entity of Gnosticism associated with the sun, often represented on Gnostic gemstones as a creature with the head of a rooster and the lower body of a serpent.
This is the case with the Landscape with Coral and Jade Pagodas and The King Watches the Initiates Enter the Temple (included in the Palais de Tokyo exhibition, 2008), which seem to depict several similar themes. Regarding the first painting, Crowley explains that the scene shows 'pilgrims in the mountains going to a coral and jade pagoda'. As for the other image, Crowley does not mention it in his diary, but the scene seems to depict a king (or high priest) sitting on a mountainside, watching a temple below, by the side of a small lake. Tiny white figures climb the steps that lead to the interior of the temple. These must be the pilgrims, or even candidates for initiation. The scene brings to mind the ancient temple and lake of Nemi, celebrated in The Golden Bough by James Frazer, which Crowley had read with much interest.
But the collection also includes three astonishing works already mentioned briefly: the three tarot card studies. It is more than likely they belong to the same series, for they have the same format and were painted on the same medium (wood). These are the only surviving Crowley works of this nature, and part of their curiosity lies in the fact that they were painted twenty years before the renowned Thoth deck. They therefore represent an important stage in his personal interpretation of the tarot. In his journal Crowley mentions his work on these images in December 1920, not long after the death of his daughter Poupée.
Deeply affected by this loss, Crowley painted and wrote feverishly during this period to overcome his suffering.
Of the three paintings, one is instantly recognisable as a tarot card by the highly visible identifier, the Roman numeral XVIII. This is The Moon. Several similarities can be observed between this card and its counterpart in the Thoth deck. The two dogs, for example, which usually appear in traditional tarot decks, are here replaced by two figures of the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife, Anubis. At the bottom of the card is a scarab beetle borne by a ship, in place of the traditional crab. This is Khephra, 'who travellest over the Heavens in thy bark at the Midnight Hour of the Sun'.
The second card is that of The Hierophant. Here, the Roman numeral V of the card is almost invisible unless examined closely. The initiator, here also the prophet of Thelema, is dressed in red as in other tarots. Here he wears a phallic headdress, highlighting the sexual aspect of Crowley's religious doctrine, and he holds in his hands a modified Egyptian ankh and a staff topped by a Jerusalem cross, symbols of his spiritual power. On his chest is the number 666, which Crowley adopted whenever he identified himself as the Beast of the Apocalypse of St. John. In front of the Hierophant is a group of disciples, one for each race of humanity, symbolising the universality of the new religion of Thelema and expressing the wish that this new religious revelation be accepted throughout the world. The disciples would not appear on the card in the Thoth deck. But interestingly, a photograph taken during the performance of the Rites of Eleusis staged by Crowley in 1910 shows Crowley and his kneeling disciples arranged in a pose that is highly reminiscent of the Collection's Hierophant card painting. In the background of the painting can be seen a black column and a white column, traditional symbols of the Masonic temple that also appear in specifically Crowleyan rituals such as the Gnostic Mass. At top left can be seen the Stele of Revealing, an Egyptian tablet seen by Crowley in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo when he received The Book of the Law and which gained a unique standing in the religious doctrine of Thelema. It is interesting to note that the majority of these elements disappear from the version of the same card in the Thoth deck, where they are replaced by others.
Finally, there is The Sun, most likely unfinished as it is neither dated nor signed, and it lacks the Roman numeral linked to the card (XIX). In this case, the image is extremely simple, and does not refer to any complicated symbolism. It merely shows a face occupying the foreground, surrounded by a halo, the solar nature of which is rendered by yellows and reds. It may not be only a tarot trump, but also an idealised self-portrait of Crowley, who identified himself, in the context of his religious doctrine, with the solar force.
The two interpretation are no mutually exclusive. Even if the card in the later Thoth deck would be of more sophisticated composition, the simplicity of the image in the Palermo Collection corresponds completely to what Crowley wrote in his Book of Thoth, where he insists that it is 'one of the simplest of the cards'.
As for the other paintings, the Palermo Collection also contains works from the two other categories mentioned, namely portraits and landscapes. Most notable is the portrait of Ninette Shumway, one of Crowley's concubines during his Cefalų period. This is his only known portrait of this important member of the Cefalų Thelemites. Also notable is the portrait, or rather caricature, of Robert Chanler (included in the Palais de Tokyo exhibition, 2008), the American painter whom Crowley assiduously visited when he decided to begin painting around 1918. Even if Crowley's diaries make no mention of the this painting, Chanler's name does appear explicitly, which allows its identification. On the other hand, we do not know the identity of the fat nude woman who appears in another portrait (included in the Palais de Tokyo exhibition, 2008). No allusion to this painting appears in Crowley's diaries.
Finally, Sicilian landscapes also have their importance in the collection. Crowley was especially affected by the beauty of the nature and countryside around Cefalų. On several occasions he described in his diary dazzling sunsets over the sea and expressed his desire to paint them. One piece stands out, not just because it is drawn in ink on paper, but also because it is later than the others. While all of the paintings are dated back to 1920, as mentioned, this one is dated January-February 1922.
It is most likely that Crowley's art will continue to bring us new surprises in the future. It may be that there are other works languishing in cellars or attics of Sicilian villages around Cefalų. But what is most important is that the discovery of this collection allows us to move forward in our understanding of a phenomenon. While it would be inappropriate to limit it to the artistic domain, its influence on contemporary culture, and specifically contemporary art, still remains to be rightfully assessed.
|