From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In this grizzled corner of the year, I come to you under the influence of the Hermit. The Hermit appears in the Major Arcana, the named cards of the Tarot. In him, the qualities of caution, prudence and deliberation threaten to slide into their shadow selves: excessive caution, fear, timorousness and doubt. Our Hermit was painted by Austin Osman Spare in c. 1906 and is part of a tarot set discovered in 2013 in the collection of London’s Magic Circle Museum. (Spare’s set is on display at ‘Tarot – Origins and Afterlives’ at the Warburg Institute, London, until 30 April.) Seventy dusty years unseen in the archives of a small museum is a fittingly obscure trajectory for a work of Spare’s. Born in 1886, he started as a prodigy, selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in his teens and showing at Mayfair galleries in his younger years. After the First World War he retreated to the slums of Southwark, pursuing his interests in the occult, painting impoverished local women and working, living and showing all within the same two-room studio.
The artist Grace Evelyn Rogers, who worked with Spare on the short-lived magazine The Golden Hind (1922–24), recalled visiting her friend in his digs, making her way past overflowing bins and up two flights of stairs to have her arrival met with a glare through the grimy lace curtain. In her notes on their meeting, Rogers described Spare as
a unique specimen […] with his husky cockney voice, the shock of dusty matted hair, and an avidness in the grey-blue eyes which met yours with an unconscious challenge. Deep lines furrowed his cheeks from nostril to chin; his hands with sensitive fingers were grimed with dirt of a thousand years.
On departing, she left Spare twopence for the gas meter. Spare conforms to that well-known archetype, the artist outsider. There are countless others. The title character of Alasdair Gray’s brooding, experimental novel Lanark (1981) is an artist whose life is destroyed by his acute social awkwardness and romantic inadequacy. Lanark, was, to a degree, based on Gray himself – certainly as regards intensity of focus and social shortcomings. (The Glasgow of Lanark is snarlingly renamed ‘Unthank’.)
The Hermit, from Austin Osman Spare’s tarot deck of c. 1906. Courtesy the Magic Circle Collection
Museum visitors flock to exhibitions of those anxious melancholics Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The breakthrough artist of the past decade is Hilma af Klint, a mediumistic painter whose work was barely shown in her lifetime. Hot on her heels comes Ithell Colquhoun, whose work I first saw only a decade ago, almost 30 years after her death. Colquhoun, whose work is at Tate St Ives from 1 February–5 May and Tate Britain from 13 June–19 October, was associated with the Surrealist movement in Britain between 1930 and 1940 but spent her prolific post-war years pursuing studies in diverse branches of occult lore. At various times she was a deaconess of the Ancient Celtic Church, a Lady of Honour of the Order of the Keltic Cross, Master Mason of the Order of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masonry for Men and Women and member of the Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx. Who cares about nomination to the Royal Academy of Arts if you’ve already been ordained a priestess of Isis? Like Spare, Colquhoun created her own tarot deck, though she favoured the spelling ‘taro’ because – hey – why conform?
In our current moment it is a received truth that to be successful, an artist must be a socially adept extrovert. The language and practice of the corporate world has migrated into the art world, and artists are instructed to network, to create a strong brand and to market themselves avidly. They are expected to perform on social media, creating diverting videos in which they appear in a state of alluring creative dishevelment in proximity to their work. The route to success is expected to take them through lifestyle shoots in Sunday colour supplements and tearful revelations of minor trauma with chummy podcast hosts. There are only a few artists I know who feel comfortable performing in this way, and – I think this is key – they are far from being those making the most interesting work.
Ithell Colquhoun photographed in c. 1932 by Man Ray. Photo: Guy Carrard; © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn; © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP Paris/Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
There is an interesting unspoken logic to pushing artists to conduct themselves more like businesspeople. Many collectors made their wealth in finance or tech and it stands to reason that they feel more comfortable in the company of those who speak their language. An artist who displays the extroverted, self-confident behaviours denoting fitness for leadership in a corporate environment will read as a winning contender in the battle for supremacy in art. Under the common flag of businesslike behaviour, encounters between collector and artist will be blessedly frictionless.
A great proportion of artists tend toward timidity and self-doubt and face public interactions with trepidation. There are those too nervous to attend their own private views. Most dread small talk and loathe the notion of networking. All would prefer to be in their studio than almost anywhere else, which it strikes me as an admirable level of focus. If the art world favours those artists willing and able to immerse themselves in the hustle of extrovert self-promotion, then it risks blinding itself to the work of wallflowers, misfits and introverts. To most artists, in other words.
It should not be for the artist to manipulate themselves into corporate behaviours to make the collector comfortable. Instead, it behoves those who patronise the art world to accommodate its denizens’ susceptibility to the influence of the Hermit.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.