Not Without My Ghosts review – Yikes! It's time to unleash your inner Scooby Doo

Drawing Room, London
From a seance with a museum in space to Victorian spectres and an artist more depraved than Aubrey Beardsley, this fascinating celebration of ethereal forces keeps wrecking the spooky mood

It’s a ghost! And a naughty one at that. The apparition floats up, sprouting faun-like forms and wicked faces in what resembles a cloud of opium smoke. This vision, in a drawing by the early 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare, emanates from a creature at the bottom of the page, whose hand is hard at work between his thighs. Another work by Spare, in this exhibition about “mediumistic drawing”, blossoms with spectral faces and devilish beings surrounding a nude youth in ecstasy.

Spare is fantastic, like an even more depraved Aubrey Beardsley, taking the fin de siècle master’s luscious graphics into seedy and deranged territory. For Spare seems to genuinely believe he has Seen Things. His art was championed by the occult leader (his followers hate it when you say satanist) Aleister Crowley. The demons Spare portrays have an awful reality.

At the Drawing Room, London, until 1 November. Then touring the UK with Hayward Gallery Touring.

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