Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  William Prooder

  1867–1889

  The Emperor, Unseen

  1889

  Oil on linen

  The only child of a Yorkshire butcher, William Prooder demonstrated a remarkable facility for drawing from an early age, delighting in elaborately detailed sketches of the interior of his father’s shop and its piled carcasses. As a student at William Dodson’s Academy of Art, he had fared poorly, quickly tiring of the repetitive exercises and uninspiring teaching methods of the staff, at whose hands he often suffered. Shy and withdrawn, with pale, perpetually bruisedlooking features, Prooder was unusually devoted to Hugo Ayling, but seemed ill at ease with von Kreitz and the other members of the group, especially Henry Turling, whom he both loathed and feared.

  Yet Prooder was a painter of uncommon skill. The still life’s traditional emphasis on mortality achieves a fevered apotheosis in his work, which features increasingly elaborate, almost altar-like arrangements of butchered meat and fruit, often in a state of near-putrefaction. His small, intricate canvases display an intensely trompe l’oeil realism that drew gasps of amazement, as well as consternation, from the Haywards’ guests. In The Emperor, Unseen, the composition is centered on a mass of entrails and viscera from some unknown animal, surrounded by scattered papers, a small prism, and several curious-looking instruments. The scene is depicted in near-total darkness, illuminated only by pale, bluish light that seems to emanate from a great distance. To the right looms a monstrous bust, roughly carved from dark stone. The face of the figure is turned away from us, but something about its general outlines is deeply unsettling. Oddly, the bust’s shadow is inconsistent with the other objects in the painting, and appears much more clearly defined.

  Henry Turling

  English, 1860–1889

  Knowledge

  1888

  Oil on canvas

  The youngest son of a dissolute earl with a halfhearted involvement in the collection of eighteenth-century etchings, Henry Turling had painted throughout his youth without seeing art as anything more than a pleasant diversion. After being sent down from Eaton for gambling, he became a regular habitué of several private clubs in London. Seemingly on a lark, he submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy and was accepted. As a student, Turling appeared indifferent to painting but possessed an uncanny knack for caricature and satirical portraits in the manner of Hogarth. A brusque, raw-boned individual capable of casual, almost cheerful brutality, Turling nonetheless had the rare ability to catch the essence of a subject in a few simple gestures. By the time of his introduction to the group at Blane, Turling had become something of an inveterate gambler, and his continued patronage of Soho’s gaming rooms resulted in his eventual expulsion from the academy.

  As part of the New Tremor, Turling pushed the capabilities of portraiture to unusual extremes. Knowledge, a painting some speculate was intended as a portrait of von Kreitz, represents the culmination of Turling’s wholly singular style, which in some ways anticipates the multiplying planes and untethered contours of cubism. On initial inspection, the painting appears to have no subject at all; the viewer is confronted with an indecipherable tangle of unstable lines—ragged bands of black, crimson, and umber vibrating in a somehow fibrous-looking fog. However, as one’s eyes move across the painting, the wavering outlines seem to shift, and a clear image of a seated figure appears—only to vanish when gazed at directly. Even more unsettling, this fugitive impression is inconsistent; in one moment, the man depicted seems youthful and full of a fierce vitality; in the next, the figure seems horribly aged, marked by the livid corruption of the grave. The effect could not be reproduced and Turling later insisted that he did not recall how he had achieved it.

  _____________________________________________________

  THE NEW TREMOR

  Toward the close of the 1800s, Victorian England found itself in the midst of an upsurge of interest in all things mystical and arcane. The occult was enjoying a new vogue among certain circles of the wealthy and privileged. Dozens of Masonic lodges were appearing throughout Europe, each professing some claim to esoteric traditions that reached as far back as ancient Egypt. Prominent in these circles were the Haywards, an old and extremely rich family from southern England. Aside from their fantastic wealth, the Haywards were known for their long-standing reputation for eccentricity and purported dalliance with magic and the occult.19 Most recently, the family had been involved in the development of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society perhaps best known for its most infamous member, Aleister Crowley.

  In the early 1880s, Baron Hoxton Hayward and his wife, Baroness Asenath Hayward, had regularly hosted a number of the Golden Dawn’s founders—including William Wynn Westcott and MacGregor Mathers—at Blane, the Hayward country estate near Kent. By 1885, however, the Haywards, whose interests seemed somewhat more exotic than even Mathers’s and Westcott’s, had broken their ties with the group, taking up with a much more radical circle of occult enthusiasts. The primary members of this group included a doctor of theology named Arnold Gather, a mysterious and shabbily dressed individual who referred to himself as “Lord” Wren, and Mrs. Octavia Shell, a former actress who enjoyed great popularity among London’s more Bohemian set.20 This vaguely sinister triumvirate quickly won favor with the Haywards, and before long they had become semi-permanent guests at Blane.21

  In the course of their undertakings, Gather, Wren, and Shell had become fixated upon the role that images might play in establishing contact with other regions of existence. While the precise nature of this role is not clear, it is evident that the group was deeply engaged with this problem, so much so that they had taken under their collective wing a young and gifted painter named Hugo Ayling, who had recently left the Royal Academy under a cloud. Inexperienced and impressionable, Ayling was easily seduced by the trio’s considerable charm and promises of initiation into secret systems of knowledge.

  It was shortly after their “acquisition” of Ayling in late 1886 that the three occultists encountered a strange figure during one of their periodic forays into the labyrinth of tiny bookstores, shuttered storefronts, and underground pubs that populated the shabby neighborhoods near the British Museum. In the back room of a nameless bookseller, they found themselves inexplicably drawn to a series of anonymous charcoal sketches. A series of inquiries regarding the artist’s identity eventually led them to a filthy back-alley flat inhabited by a bent, scarred man dressed in worn and out-of-date clothing. It was Reinhold von Kreitz.

  How or when von Kreitz had arrived in England remains a mystery. At the time of his encounter with the Blane occultists, the former professor of the Schmidt-Bauern Kunstakademie was living in near destitution, eking out a meager existence giving lectures to private audiences and selling “elevated views” of London landmarks from a makeshift stall. Whatever strange cogs of fate had engineered it, the chance meeting with Gather, Wren, and Shell was to provide von Kreitz with yet another improbable reversal of his fortunes. Discovering in the painter a kindred spirit, the three introduced him to the Haywards; given the breadth of von Kreitz’s knowledge and the nature of his ideas about art, it was not long before the baron and baroness had him installed at Blane, where he was provided with his own apartment and studio. It was at Blane that von Kreitz first met Hugo Ayling, who at that time was working as an assistant to the accomplished portraitist William Powell Frith.22

  Over the course of the following months, Ayling brought a number of other artists to visit Blane. Three in particular—Henry Turling, George Heathman, an
d William Prooder—fell under von Kreitz’s spell; despite his appearance, he still retained much of his strange ability to enthrall. Like Ayling, Turling and Heathman had been students at the Royal Academy of Art, while Prooder was still a student at William Dodson’s Academy of Art.

  Much like their ill-fated predecessors in Mannheim, the young British artists soon apprenticed themselves to von Kreitz, who wasted no time in resuming the investigations that had been so violently interrupted twenty-five years earlier. Christening the group the “New Tremor,” von Kreitz began initiating his latest disciples into his singular approach to painting. However, unlike the Mannheim group, the English circle enjoyed the support of the Haywards’ generous patronage, and with the active participation of Gather, Wren, and Shell, the New Tremor was soon creating canvases that outstripped the efforts of the earlier group in their ability to produce powerful and unsettling effects on the viewer.23

  THE EXHIBITION AT BLANE

  In the autumn of 1889, invitations were sent out to select members of London’s cultural elite, announcing a private exhibition at Blane that was to showcase the recent efforts of “The New Brotherhood of Das Beben.” The exhibition was the brainchild of von Kreitz, who had deemed the time ripe to expose the group’s work to the rest of the world.24 Some sense of the ambitions that the odd community at Blane harbored for the exhibition may be found in a piece of correspondence from Baron Hayward to his cousin Angus MacDonald, who shared many of his proclivities. In a letter dated May 1, 1889, Hayward wrote: “The work of our little group proceeds with a rapidity that has exceeded even my most audacious imaginings. Increasingly, they seem to work as one, like the five fingers of some great Hand; by the close of the year, I feel certain we here at Blane shall be exulting in the dawn of a New Age, a glorious revelation of darkness founded on the purified ruins of the old world.”25

  Three new paintings by von Kreitz himself were to form the central elements of the exhibition, which would include a number of new works by Ayling, Prooder, Heathman, and Turling—among them, Ayling’s latest painting, The Gathered Clan, a portrait of the Haywards that had been commissioned by the baroness. The exhibition was to be held in Blane’s orangery, a large, vaulted space that had been added to the south facade in 1802. Originally designed as a secondary gallery by Baron Hayward’s father, the orangery was some hundred feet in length, with six large windows on the exterior wall and fruit-bearing orange trees in planters positioned in the spaces between them.

  The exhibition at Blane was to have included the following works: von Kreitz, The River-Bank, Nightfall, Krankhelm Island, Fog, December, 1867, and The Contents of Forthold’s General Store, Ebbe, Krankhelm Island, February, 1870; Turling, Mrs. Shell, With Shears, Study for A.H., and In Esteemed Company; Heathman, Over, Behind, Beneath, and Rampant; Prooder, The Tyranny of Time, The Emperor of the Unseen, and Our Lady of Sorrows; Ayling, The Gathered Clan.

  Several firsthand accounts of the exhibition from local guests who visited Blane while the work was still being hung refer to a “drastic and impatient” style, a tone that struck most commentators as “angry, even rude,” and distortions of perspective that seemed forced and unnatural. “Are these faces, approaching us in the island’s fog?” asked a local writer, Benedick Worsthorne. “It is tempting to take these worn, indistinct visages as mere swirls of vapor, or as those of figures more spectral than human.” Arnold Trump, a critic from the Kentishman who had come by for an early look, wrote, “Mr. von Kreitz drains all substantiality from his paints, leaving us to guess at whatever what strange and ill-meaning symbology lurks upon his canvases. His island’s emporium seems empty of all goods but for the mute yet wailing shades they left behind.” Of The River-Bank, Nightfall, a local clergyman, the Canon Arthur Summerson, had this to say: “Despite the grave innocence of its subject matter, the painting feels like a pasteboard mask, which at any moment threatens to peel away, revealing a terrifying vista of debasement.”

  Excerpt from The Art of Rumor’s Legends, Burton Purddry (Calais, Vermont: Ashton Press, 1927):

  The eccentricities of von Kreitz’s “New Tremor” disciples supposedly extended to the impossibilities of their effects. In their hands—those of Heathman and Ayling, at any rate—objects and persons are said, as had earlier been claimed of paintings by von Kreitz and Klappenburg, to be capable of movement. George Heathman’s Rampant, a canvas of unusual shape, was described by a servant who assisted in the mounting of the exhibition as “akin to the mail-slot of the greatest post-box ever seen, nearly half a meter in height and two in length.” (Letters from Persons of Various Stations Resident at Blane, ed. Harald Hayward, Comfort Blanton, 1936.) Across the painting’s length was depicted a misty day in a seaside village (thought to be Heathman’s hometown, Folkestone); a brisk wind billows a series of tradesmen’s awnings bearing the names of various shops. The servant claimed that this painting caused him to feel “all swimmy” whenever he looked at it. Two days after the fire, local writer Arnold Trump, ever the faithful diarist, recorded (in tones of amusement) that an elderly female Hayward relative who was visiting Blane had taken him aside to complain that a “horrid force” had threatened to thrust itself from between the awnings depicted in the painting. “It wishes to be free, and it intends us all great unhappiness!” she claimed.

  In Hugo Ayling’s The Gathered Clan, considered by some to be the finest of the “New Tremor” paintings (and their sole survivor), the Hayward family stands posed before the imposing facade of Blane. Behind and to the left of the family, the uniformed staff stands ranked in a wedge. A good distance to the right of the family, there are four odd people in two equal groups. (Many generations of Haywards had been interested in the occult, and these some of the leading figures of the time.) Between the two groups there is a black-hooded figure, moving forward. The same elderly relative reported to Trump that, overnight, this figure had moved forward by a quarter of an inch, perhaps a bit more, and that its goal was clearly to move out of the painting altogether. It wished to escape into the world, she was certain, where it would manifest the sickness already to be sensed within the surface of the painting. “What is terrible,” she told Trump, “is that poor, unwell Mr. Ayling possesses a wondrous talent and his painting would be exceeding beautiful—were it not for the moral illness that corrupts the whole.”

  Although Ayling’s masterpiece does survive, we have no opportunity to determine whether the black-cowled figure has indeed escaped the painting. For more than five decades, The Gathered Clan has been locked within a temperature-controlled, light-sensitive vault beneath the Milwaukee Art Museum, the object of an ongoing legal dispute between American factions of the Hayward family.

  THE SECOND FIRE

  At approximately 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, October 13, 1889, the day after an unofficial reception for the Haywards’ inner circle, a fire broke out in the orangery. The “Second Fire,” as it came to be known, killed von Kreitz, Prooder, Turling, and Heathman, along with two of the Haywards’ servants. It destroyed a third of the house, including the orangery, and consumed the entire collection of Das Beben paintings housed there, with the sole exception of Ayling’s The Gathered Clan.26

  Speculation suggested that the blaze might have begun as a result of sunlight, magnified by a pane of glass, falling upon a painter’s oily rag left unnoticed behind an easel. (A servant later claimed she had seen “a sort of rainbow” glinting from an upper window of the orangery shortly before the fire.) Whatever the cause, the flames spread almost instantly to the entire row of paintings and onto the wall behind them, proceeding rapidly into the scullery and kitchen, then
down the hallway, engulfing the ceiling and rising into the floor above. The entire western half of Blane, some twenty-one rooms, was reduced to a mass of charred beams and twisted metal rising out of the wine cellar. The remains of von Kreitz, Turling, Heathman, and Prooder were eventually found in the ruins of the orangery.

  AFTERMATH

  In the wake of the disaster, the Haywards and most of their remaining staff returned to London, taking up occupancy in their residence in Eaton Square, where Baron Hayward immediately began drawing up plans for the reconstruction of Blane.

  Gather, Wren, and Shell all survived the conflagration. As though warned in advance, the three had returned to London only a few hours before the fire started. Without a ripple, they vanished back into the strange London underworld from which they had emerged.27

  Masterless and destitute, Hugo Ayling, the last remaining member of Das Beben, descended quickly into poverty and poor health. In 1894, he was apprehended wandering London’s East End, half-naked and incoherent. Deemed mentally unsound by a court physician, Ayling was dispatched to Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam), an institution for the criminally insane. There, as though by some secret joke of fate, he was given the cell previously occupied by the painter and patricide Richard Dadd.28

  At Bethlem, Ayling painted inoffensive depictions of the sunlight entering his cell through its single windows, remembered landscapes of his childhood, and intricately detailed “portraits,” as he called them, of the large, dark individual stones in his cell’s walls. Upon release, Ayling moved into the slums and estaminets of South London, where, for the last years of his life, he survived in dire poverty, drawing illustrations for broadsides and works of erotic literature published by Pego Press, Peckham Rye. In the first several years of the twentieth century, he met and briefly became a mentor to the talented but eccentric young painter Austin Osman Spare. It was at some point during this period that Ayling composed Thoughts in Motley, a small chapbook filled with strange and disconnected ramblings.