Welcome to Three Minute Art History. I'm Mead McLean for AUSQUARED.com Today's lesson is on Austin Osmans Bear. As best I can figure, Austin Osmans Bear was the very first surrealist. The word surrealism didn't exist when he was starting out, but he was already doing work that dealt with the same subjects in a very similar way. I don't think that he gets grouped with them, typically, because he was and is too weird to be a surrealist. He started out going to the Royal College of Art in the UK and his dad submitted a couple of his early works to the Royal Academy Summer Show, which gave him some early notoriety. At a young age he met a witch who introduced him to a very personal style of magic, which he developed in Chaos Magic, where a practitioner would write a statement of intent down. It would then be converted into a sigil or image, then the practitioner would meditate until the mind silences while focusing on the sigil, then destroy the sigil, forgetting it afterwards, and then supposedly whatever the statement of intent was would actually happen. His most developed images are his side aerial portraits. He would take printed images of celebrities, look at them at an angle, and then paint them on this angle. The effect is as if they were pulled and distorted, yet they retained the dimensionality that he was able to create with his realistic academic training. During World War I he was assigned to draw images of the battlefields. Having survived that, he came back to the UK where he lived, a modest depor existence, keeping open house in his flat and selling drawings for his little is two pounds. He published a text called Automatic Drawing in 1916, but he was doing automatic drawings as early as 1900. This technique was picked up or discovered independently by the sigilist a bit later. Andre Bertan published the first manifesto of sigilism in 1924, so that's quite a bit later than Austin's Bayer's Automatic Drawing. In 1924 Bertan mentions automatic writing as a corollary to this. The idea of the technique is to turn off one's conscious mind, allowing the hand to draw freely without any influence, as the marks are made certain images appear and are then developed into more polished images of figures. Spare often wrote of waking up at night with his hand moving over his sketchbook drawing while asleep. Perhaps even for hours he'd wake up with ten complete drawings that he didn't even remember doing. So Spare certainly deserves some attention, particularly if you're interested in the occult sigilism or an experimental music. He's been a big influence on artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Psychy TV, Valdenum, and Genesis P. Orge. My name is Mead McLean and this has been three minutes of art history. Thank you.