Wallace Beery Differentiation, 1932 (pastel & pencil on paper)

In 1930 Spare began to draw anamorphic heads, that he called 'Experiments in Relativity'. He first showed these in what was to be his last exhibition in the West End, in November that year. The show was not a success. Spare called these heads 'Sidereal', as opposed to Surreal, a pun on the literal meaning of the word 'determined by the stars' and 'real from the side.' The subjects were taken from photographs of film stars that he cut out of magazines. Wallace Beery won an Oscar for Best Actor as the star of The Champ (1931), and was later Pancho Villa in Villa Villa! (1934), and Long John Silver in Treasure Island of the same year. Spare could have seen these films in the Trocadero, the largest cinema in Europe, at the Elephant and Castle near his home in London. He regarded film stars as modern Pagan gods, and in rendering them this way he sought to capture their real existence in a spatial 'fourth dimension'. The results, in the hands of this great draughtsman, were powerful and unsettling. Spare only once met a real film star: James Mason in a pub at London Bridge in 1949. He was so excited when Mason said he'd actually heard of him that he walked into the Ladies by mistake.