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Virgin Painter or Old Master
by
Martin P. Starr
So wrote Crowley whose seldom-seen graphic output is the subject of this first posthumous exhibit. A very few of Crowley's paintings and drawings have been published in the fifty years since his death. The greatest portion of his work has been known to me through generations of copies of black and white photographs which of course give no hint of Crowley's talent as a colorist. Surely the lack of attention his art has received in the last sixty-six plus years since his October 1931 Porza Gallery exhibit in Berlin make it time enough to call for an appraisal of his creative work in chalk, charcoal, paint, pencil and watercolor. Likening himself to Blake, Crowley saw his Art, as the above quotation demonstrates, as the essence of the spiritual pursuit. But in this he is an unknown god. His contribution and artistic legacy have received scant mention in the intervening years outside of the various biographies and general works on the Occult. The facts speak for themselves: Crowley's art was exhibited twice in his lifetime and none of it is to be found in public collections. Consequently one searches in vain for discussions of Crowley as an artist in even the most exhaustive surveys of modern art. But Crowley did not seek fame as a painter but as a poet and magician. His life in the Bohemian world of London, Paris and New York repeatedly intersected with major artists—Rodin, Jacob Epstein, Man Ray, to name a few—as well as some now remembered more for their lives than for their art, such as Augustus John, Sir Gerald Kelly and Nina Hamnett. The reputation of his quondam disciple and illustrator Austin Osman Spare has enjoyed a renaissance in the last two decades, and now it is Crowley's turn to be rediscovered as an artist whose genius, like that of Spare's, flowered outside the creative world of his contemporaries. The only major treatment of his painting is Kenneth Anger's 1955 documentary, Thelema Abbey, based on his work restoring the murals covering the walls, floors and doors of the "Abbey of Thelema" in Cefalu, Sicily; and this, too, has been out of public circulation for many years. Crowley's magical moment has arrived! The following is a tour of the high points in Crowley's development as a visual artist, and makes no attempt to decide which of his self-chosen appellations, "Virgin Painter" or "Old Master," most appropriately describes his work. As a Cambridge undergraduate and budding poet, Crowley found a place at the table with the Decadents and through the influence of his future brother-in-law, Gerald Kelly, had an immediate exposure to the artistic underground of late Victorian England.
In this world, however, Crowley the writer pictured himself as an art critic, and he devotes a fair amount of space in his autobiography and elsewhere deconstructing Kelly as a painter, lambasting him for both his approach in developing his work and his ambition to be a figure of respectability, harnessing his creative power to the service of proper society. Indeed, Crowley qua critic loudly twitted the academic approach to painting, whereby one attempted to learn the secrets of the Masters by copying their method, "like naughty schoolboys copying out painfully 3000 lines of Vergil." This mocking stanza well sums up Crowley's view of Kelly:
Gerald Kelly's pictures are extraordinarily grand; Gerald Kelly's pictures are entirely done by hand. Every little picture tells a story of its own: Every little sitter—well, the tailoring alone! Every little picture is according to the rules: Gerald Kelly learnt it all in such a lot of schools. Gerald Kelly laboured till he caught the tony trick: Gerald K—— Excuse me, I am going to be sick!
In the same period Crowley was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose approach to Western Occultism, with its elaborate ritual, color symbolism and panoply of magical practices, must have greatly stimulated his visual imagination. Despite their close connection and mutual esthetic interests, never is there a suggestion that Crowley himself might one day take up the brush in the same way Kelly the painter took up the Magic of the Golden Dawn. In Art, as in Magic, the key is a kind of controlled enthusiasm, a direct communication with one's own sleeping genius, that transforms both the creator and his creation. Crowley would have echoed the credo of Lautremont, that Art was to be ecstatic, or not at all.
But strangely enough Crowley's approach to these two pursuits are quite antithetical. Crowley does not acknowledge a need for training in Art the way he absolutely saw the need for a disciplined and balanced approach to Magic, upon which subject he penned several million words. The Magic taught in the Golden Dawn was firmly rooted in tradition, it was taught in a graded series of instructions and it required a considerable amount of study and practice to master. Nowhere was it suggested that the aspiring adept should simply pick up a wand and begin to invoke—in fact, when Kelly attempted to do the same, Crowley again mocked him and his subsequent and predictable failure. The grades of the First and especially the Second Order, where the bulk of the magical practices were taught, demanded time and effort and testing of one's skills. A naive, untrained approach to art was exactly the route Crowley advocated and followed out, with the results we see about us, giving rise to his later moniker of the "Virgin Painter." Crowley, always one to get in the last word, later noted in his 1920 diary that Kelly commented on Crowley's art to the effect that "people who don't know how to draw or paint can always do amusing things. But what worries me is that people who do know how to draw and paint, or so they tell us, can't do amusing things."
A virgin Magician he was not. Other that private work for magical purposes, such as the rough but powerful illuminated version of "Liber Pyramidos" reproduced in The Commentaries on the Holy Books, Crowley does not attempt to paint or draw seriously until around 1917. Instead he turned to others in his circle. He had the good fortune and the good sense combined to enlist the services of J.F.C. Fuller, who excelled at mechanical drawing, and Austin Spare to create the needed illustrations for The Equinox Volume I.
Crowley carefully supervised and critiqued their work, and was proud of Fuller's contribution in particular. When the Golden Dawn material was edited by Israel Regardie in the 1930s, he wrote in his diary of his disgust at Fuller's beautiful drawings having been replaced by Regardie, which "would have been rejected in an infant art class."
Crowley's explanation of his break into visual art came with his being named a contributing editor in August 1917 of a New York literary and political monthly called The International: A Review of Two Worlds. As Crowley told the story, he grew weary over the lack of talented artists to draw the covers of The International, which prior to Crowley's editorship sported the same drab socialist cover on every issue. Although he had never studied art, this was no let or hindrance. None of the covers of The International actually feature Crowley's work—the covers are signed by Leon Engers-Kennedy and others—but they bear the mark of his input. Sketches survive which demonstrate that Crowley did indeed at least begin to draw seriously for public viewing. The Crowley sketch for the December 1917 cover of The International as bears no resemblance to the published work by the artist and Crowley disciple Leon Engers-Kennedy, which is also in a primitive style. Tracing the development of Crowley's consciously naive style has been made simple enough by his own practice. Virtually all his work is signed and dated. Works from Crowley's first year of painting, 1917, are signed "Aleister Crowley" and are dated "An XIII", the reference being to the 13th year of the New Aeon beginning in 1904. The pieces from 1918 are also signed with his name and dated "An. XIV", with the addition of the Sun Sign.
Also the initial "A" in Aleister has transformed itself into the now-familiar phallic "A"—both of these elements can be seen in the reproduction of May Morn in the Blue Equinox. By 1919, Crowley's signature is reduced to the phallic "A", plus the year of the Aeon and the Sun Sign; and this is how he signs his work for the rest of his career.
From the start, Crowley's choice of subjects for his art mirrors his own fascination with the powers of the world of imagination. The best account we have of Crowley's initial phase of artistic activity is found in a February 1919 story in the New York Evening World, which describes at some length Crowley's studio overlooking Washington Square. When asked to describe his art, Crowley said:
Here we have the essence of Crowley's point-of-view on his own art. There are a variety of themes in his early work which parallel his own writing style; they are an entertaining mixture of sex, Magick, social commentary and humor.
I find it significant that Crowley takes up art after he had produced the majority of his literary output. Perhaps he had, in all those millions of words, finally said his piece and wanted another way to fix his ideas in permanent form? Without question, his art was a compelling focus for his creativity, one more visual and tactile and equally as cerebral as his poetry and prose. Indeed, viewing some of these pieces is like getting a glimpse inside Crowley's amazingly fertile brain, which I liken to a volcano. The weird astral landscapes, the hideously distorted faces, the nightmarish totems and taboos fill his pictures with a mixture of dread, wonder and laughter. You get a sense of this when he describes the watercolor entitled A Day Dream of Dead Hats.
The greatest piece of his early period was the Screen of Dead Souls, a triptych executed in oils in January 1919. Its genesis was Crowley's first attempt to draw from the nude, his sitter being his lover Leah Hirsig. He was daunted by the task, gave it up and then in his sleeplessness noticed if he looked at his drawing vertically instead of horizontally, that it worked. Inspired by her request to "paint me as a dead soul," Crowley went feverishly to work, painting Leah in the central panel as the Queen of Dead Souls. He describes it thus:
The latter was one Robert Winthrop Chanler, a New York artist of the period who also painted Crowley's portrait. Crowley delighted in the fact that Chanler, one of the few men Crowley ever loved, admired the screen greatly and brought around his fellow Greenwich Village bohemians to gaze and gloat.
Alas, this work has apparently been lost for many years and all we have of what Crowley considered "the greatest work of the Old Master" are a few photographs and Crowley's description of it. Perhaps it languishes in some dealer's attic in London or Leipzig, waiting to be rediscovered by a kindred dead soul?
Once Crowley picks up the brush, he does not let it rest. After he leaves the USA at the end of 1919, he continues to paint and draw incessantly. Out of his early style, which is more akin to caricature, he develops an intimacy with the portrait, as if by focusing on the human head he somehow is picturing the consciousness of the sitter—he wrote a series of short comments on his paintings where he elaborates on the ideas behind the paintings. Although there are plenty of portraits which are little more than caricature, there are a number of highly sensitive and carefully executed heads of the various women he loved which demonstrate that Crowley possessed a great ability for drawing naturally. It again suggests that the more the sitter meant to Crowley personally, the greater the effort he took when drawing her. It is these drawings I used to illustrate Crowley's translation of Baudelaire's Little Poems in Prose. And this care is not restricted to the ladies: one of the finest portraits is that of his friend and fellow poet-magician Victor Neuburg, with whom he had an undying connection. But Crowley repudiated "Realism" as a goal of Art. In his diary he wrote:
But there was a limit to Crowley's reproach to realism in Art:
And worrying the victim was exactly the intent of the "Chambres des Cauchemars," the central room of the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily, where Crowley and his disciples took up residence on April 1, 1920. Three walls were painted in riotous colors to represent Earth, Heaven and Hell. Their purpose:
In our present day, it is easy to imagine what the "certain secret process" might have included. Crowley mentions in his autobiography that he visited the Detroit laboratories of the drug company Parke Davis in October 1915, where they were kind enough to make for him a special mescaline preparation. It was a fine addition to the abundant personal pharmacopoeia of the Lord Abbot, who also had a supply of ether, opium and other drugs. Also, the mescaline, with which he experimented heavily, must have been a major boost to his sense of color. In short, Crowley was an early psychedelic researcher and the Room of Nightmares his lab, all done with quite serious intention, for he believed that the initiates, by passing through the ordeal of confronting what Jane Wolfe described as a "Hollywood set for Dante's Inferno," were immunized against the "bad trips" which "interfere between the soul and its divine Self."
Having been forced to fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell, they have obtained permanent master of their minds. The process is similar to that of Psychoanalysis; it releases the subject from fear of Reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalizing and thus disarming the specters that lie in ambush for the Soul of Man.
It was surely an ambitious project and again Crowley wrote a detailed description of the paintings and their spiritual meaning; alas, we have more of the essay today than we do of the paintings it describes.
From the accounts of the resident disciples C.F. Russell and Jane Wolfe, we learn that Crowley sketched the figures on the walls of the Chambre—which doubled as Crowley's bedroom—while Jane did some of the painting of the walls. Unfortunately there are few surviving photographs of the Abbey paintings. Crowley was expelled from Italy on order of Mussolini in 1923, never to return. His disciples left one by one and some time after the last of them departed in 1926 the walls were whitewashed over.
The house lay empty until a young American filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, arrived on the scene in 1955 just as the two embittered owners of the house and grounds were building a wall down the center of the property to divide it in half, right through the center of the domed temple room, thus destroying the elaborate circle painted on the tile floor. Anger carefully removed the whitewash and uncovered the startling paintings, out of which he made the documentary Thelema Abbey. Despite Anger's enthusiasm and desire to restart a proper Abbey of Thelema on the spot, there was no interest among Crowley's disciples in preserving the Abbey. The pre-eminent Crowley conservator and ex-disciple, Gerald Yorke, refused to put up money to buy the property fearing it would become "a show piece of pornography for American tourists." The warring owners let the house lay in its semi-ruined state. But time changes all things; recent Italian newspaper articles report that the Abbey is now a registered national monument and there are plans for a "Crowley Museum" in Cefalu! But perhaps it is too little, too late. Like the rest of Crowley's art, so much has been lost or misplaced or cached away.
Crowley the wandering Gentile is on the move for the remainder of the 1920s, and this did not make it easy for him to continue to paint and draw, but he did, at a lesser rate. It was a fugue that led him in the summer of 1929 to P.R. Stephensen, whose Mandrake Press in Bloomsbury had published a book of another writer-turned-painter, D.H. Lawrence. Stephensen and the Mandrake took on Crowley's works "at such heavy tonnage" including his massive Confessions, whose prospectus boasted that "this astonishing man has also painted over 200 canvasses which will cause an artistic furore if he can be persuaded to exhibit them." Stephensen was hoping for a row with the police such as the Lawrence exhibit had caused and a public scandal which would help sell the Confessions. Alas, the only furore that was aroused was in Stephensen's partner and source of funds, Edward Goldston, who withdrew and killed the planned exhibition.
Crowley was not easily daunted by failure, and he persisted in the more liberal climate of Berlin, eventually finding a gallery willing to show his work. Crowley was given a great dose of confidence in his art by the gallery director Nierendorf, who told him that "there are only three other living painters to be classed with me & that I can get Rm. 25,000 per picture IF." As to be expected for such an essential optimist, Crowley saw great virtue in IF. The planning for the exhibition wore heavily on his relationship with his right-hand man Karl Germer, who was barely on speaking terms with Crowley up to the opening and dropped their relations for some time after it closed. But none of the ceaseless arguments held up Crowley's first and only gallery show, which opened at the Gallery Neumann-Nierendorf on October 11, 1931, to reasonably good press. An essay in the exhibit catalogue on Crowley by Karl Nierendorf makes the following observation of Crowley.
In other words, Crowley fit in nicely with the German Expressionists and had an appreciation for their work. Whether any returned the notice is not so certain. It is also unclear whether or not Crowley considered the exhibit a success; we know that few if any of the works sold, and the most of them traveled back to Britain along with their creator, who never again leaves the country of his birth.
After 1932 Crowley continues to paint and draw, to amuse himself or his mistress of the moment. The later portraits, almost all of them female heads, are numerous but few show as much care as the earlier ones. One interesting mixture of Poetry and Art came with his translation of a little Taoist poem, Khing Kang King which he published privately in a large paper limited edition; copies were sold by him personally with a painting or drawing appropriate to the Chinese theme.
Although Crowley designed and closely supervised the painting of the Tarot cards by Frieda Lady Harris, he reverts back to the role he took with Fuller and Spare, that of art director and not the artist per se. He provided the content and she provided the finished form.
It is a lasting creative legacy, a union of Art and Magick which has spread the Law of Thelema further than any other work. I am told it is the top-selling Tarot deck in the world today, a fact that I believe would not have surprised Crowley, who always believed in the ultimate demand for his work.
In conclusion, we must acknowledge that Crowley the Painter was as true to his motto "Perdurabo"—I shall endure—in his roles as an Adept and as an Artist. May his boundless, ambitious spirit which calls us to the ultimate adventure inspire all the visitors to this exhibit, and may each take away a measure of the genius who brought us here.
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