Chuck Sperry

By

Edwardian Ball 2025 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2025
22 x 28
Edition of 250
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

This poster is officially available at the show in SF. I will make a limited online launch of my Edwardian Ball 2025 poster through EQL opening on Monday, February 3, 2025 at 9 am PST. The launch closes on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 9 am PST.

Visit the launch page for the release (countdown and launch):

JOIN EQL RELEASE

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

This year’s poster has more than an edge of social critique.

“Ladies and gentlemen, politics is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing!” – Eugène Ionesco

The far-away oligarchy of the Edwardian period is being outdone by the sinister multi-centi-billionaire, hormone-jacked, space-racing, data-driven, artificially-intelligent, techno-oligarchs of the present day. The oligarchic musings of my entire series of posters for the Edwardian Ball come into focus as a prescient warning started many, many years ago.

This year’s poster emerges from my darkest imaginings of the near future: a deadly, skeletal, imperial monarch who rules by whim and decree, conquering Greenland, and establishing his dictatorship from the Gulf of America to the Arctic Circle. 

Our potentate’s power-madness is symbolized by a scepter emblazoned with the Facebook logo. In an absurd touch, our techno-oligarch is accompanied by his royal rhinoceros draped in his ermine cloak. 

The rhino is a thematic flourish first used in my 2013 Edwardian Ball poster, and is used here as a symbolic warning based on French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco’s play “The Rhinoceros.” 

In Ionesco’s play citizens one-by-one inexplicably turn into brute, belligerent rhinoceroses. Written in 1959 the play is largely considered to be an allegory of social degradation and slow descent into fascist politics. It’s themes mirror our present-day social degradation and growing obsession with far-right ideology. 

Today’s grandiose multi-centi-billionaire oligarchs are guided toward world domination by artificial intelligence, or as Ionesco said in his play: “Being a machine is a great way to avoid thinking.”

My 2025 poster for the Edwardian Ball was foreshadowed on January 15 by outgoing President Joe Biden’s unusually dire remarks delivered during his farewell address:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”

During incoming President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Ball on the evening of January 20, five days after Biden’s warning, Trump’s multi-centi-billionaire oligarchic sidekick Elon Musk thrust a pair of nazi salutes over the crowd attending his inaugural ball. 

There, you’ve been warned.

By

Edwardian Ball 2024 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2024
14.5 x 35
Edition of 250
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

I will make a limited online launch of my Edwardian Ball 2024 poster through EQL opening on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 9 am PST. The launch closes (same day) on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 9 pm PST.

Visit the launch page for the release (countdown and launch):

JOIN EQL RELEASE

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

My 2024 poster for the Edwardian Ball is a portrait of architect Stanford White with art model turned superstar of stage and silent screen Evelyn Nesbit.

Stanford White was famous as one of the foremost architects of the Beaux-Arts style, his prolific architectural designs became known as “American Renaissance”. Simply put he created lavish Gilded Age mansions for the masters of the known universe, the Astors and the Vanderbilts among the pantheon.

White was one of a group of wealthy debauchées, all members of the Union Club, who organized frequent orgies in secret locations scattered about Manhattan. Mark Twain summed up Stanford White thus: “eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction. These facts have been well known in New York for many years.” 

Evelyn Nesbit was well-known too as New York model and chorus girl. She was frequently photographed for mass circulation newspapers, magazine advertisements, souvenir items and calendars (all media new to the Century). She started as an artist’s model in Philadelphia. Nesbit continued modeling after her family moved to New York, posing for artists including most notably Charles Dana Gibson who idealized her as a “Gibson Girl”, his extremely popular pin-ups of the era.

White set his sites on Nesbit. The affair showed his predatory modus operandi some details include: extremely uneven power relationship, luxurious settings, promises of wealth, fame, a red velvet swing suspended from the ceiling, surreptitious doses of morphine, and rape of the 16 year old ingenue.

Soon after her days with White ended, Nesbit became involved with the reckless, self-indulgent Harry Kendall Thaw, heir to a titanic Pittsburgh railroad empire. Thaw was rather unhinged, addicted to morphine, violent, sadistic, and fabulously wealthy. By way of courting Evelyn, Thaw took her on a sojourn in Europe, and begged her to marry him. 

Knowing of his insistance on the principle of chastity, Evelyn divulged the White affair and the loss of her virginity, and gave Thaw the details in a series of abusive interrogations across the Continent. 

The interrogations were punctuated by an obsessive itinerary of grim, gothic sites focusing on the cult of virgin martyrdom insisted upon by Thaw — his mad courtship — and finally, worn-down, Nesbit relented. They married and Evelyn became the “Mistress of Millions” according to the papers.

Thereafter, Thaw was obsessed with avenging Evelyn’s honor. In June 1906, the couple visited New York City to board a luxury steamliner for a second tour of Europe. Thaw brought Evelyn to the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden to attend the premier of Mam’zelle Champagne, a rave choral revue. There, in front of New York Society Thaw confronted White, and shot him dead during the finale “I Could Love A Million Girls”.

“In New York City the papers were full of the shooting of the famous architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, eccentric scion of a coke and railroad fortune. Harry K. Thaw was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated beauty who had once been Stanford White’s mistress. The shooting took place in the roof garden of the Madison Square Garden on 26th Street, a spectacular block-long building of yellow brick and terra cotta that White himself had designed in the Sevillian style. It was the opening night of a revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne, and as the chorus sang and danced the eccentric scion wearing on this summer night a straw boater and heavy black coat pulled out a pistol and shot the famous architect three times in the head. On the roof. There were screams. Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist’s model at the age of fifteen. Her underclothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue … And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.” 

— E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975)

In Thaw family lore according to Evelyn’s grandson: After Harry Thaw’s murder trial, Evelyn received a final $25,000 settlement from the Thaw family. To spite the wealthy capitalist Thaw clan, Evelyn donated the whole sum to anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman. Goldman in turn gave the money to writer, activist, and socialist John Reed, author of “Ten Days That Shook The World” — his first-person account of the Russian Revolution that toppled the Russian Imperial Family and set the Communist Revolution in motion.

By

Edwardian Ball 2023 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2023
21 x 35
Edition of 250
5 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

Sold Out – Thank You!

________________

This poster is officially available at the show in SF. I will be making a very limited online release of this poster on Sunday, February 5, 2023 between 9-10 am PST.

________________

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

This year’s poster is a portrait of the Edwardian Era’s namesake: King Edward VII. Edward was a cad’s cad. The moral of his story is one of the bilious poison of the privileged life of an ill-moralled emperor. The poison will get you in the end.

Known as “Dirty Bertie”, Edward spent every spare moment during the 20 years before ascending the throne in 1901 patronizing every bordello in Paris. His favorite establishment Le Cabanais had a reserved room for the future emperor-king complete with his coat-of-arms over his bed. Edward lodged there with his own elegant copper bathtub fashioned into an oddly shaped half-woman, half-swan (Salvador Dali later purchased Edward’s tub of ill-repute). He was keen to fill his tub with champagne. You heard that right, he bathed in champagne.

Edward was quite the inveterate blue-blooded, demi-monde and spent every night in a variety of Paris’ nightclubs in and around Montmartre, especially the legendary Moulin Rouge. If you made the scene in the Paris of the 1880’s and 90’s you would have eventually rubbed shoulders (or perhaps some body part) with the debauched future King of the British Empire. 

I shouldn’t say that Edward VII settled down after being burdened with the Crown. His appetites killed him in 9 short years on the throne. He continued his unabashedly toxic, imperial ways through an unabashedly toxic and imperial age, which shall ever bear his name: the Edwardian Era.

By

Edwardian Ball 2020 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2020
16.5 x 35
Edition of 150
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

Sold Out – Thank You!

________________

This poster is officially available at the show in SF. I will be making a very limited online release of this poster on Sunday, January 26, 2020 at a random time.

________________

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

2020 started with royals Harry and Meghan Windsor giving up their titles and station, causing all of us to ask, “Is royalty all it’s cracked up to be?”

My thoughts turned to poor, rich Consuelo Vanderbilt — inspirational Edwardian beauty. Crowds waited outside her Manhattan home to catch a glimpse of her striding between her door and carriage. Many would have her hand in marriage.

Her mother, Alva, shocked New York Society (aka “The Four Hundred”) by divorcing Consuelo’s father, a New York railroad millionaire, and schemed to regain her social standing by marrying daughter Consuelo to the greatest possible social advantage whether Consuelo was willing or not. Alva forced her daughter to wear a steel rod strapped to her back to improve her posture, whipped her with a riding crop, and awkwardly forced suitors of the highest possible rank upon her.

In rode Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, resident of a palace, related to royalty, titled, already romantically attached to another lady and deeply in debt — like a prince and frog all rolled into one. Consuelo defied the Duke and her mother. Alva locked her in her room until she gave in. 

For the tidy sum of $2.5 million (75 million today) Alva would marry Consuelo to the Duke. He could banish his debts and she would gain the title. 

Consuelo cried into her wedding veil on 6 November 1895. It was a faithless union, he cheated almost immediately, and Consuelo retaliated by cheating too. She kept a loaded revolver at her bedside to keep the Duke away, notwithstanding they had two sons, which Consuelo famously called, “the heir and the spare.”

Separated in 1906, divorced in 1921, with the acursed marriage finally annulled in 1926, she made her eventual total exit from the cad Duke and his suffocating royal society. Her second husband was French Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Balsan, daring balloon, airplane and hydroplane pilot, friend to the Wright Brothers, a dashing mustachioed Edwardian hero. Leaving all that royal balderdash on the ground below Consuelo soared off into the clouds with her French flyboy — and lived to the ripe old age of 87.   

 

By

Edwardian Ball 2019 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2019
19 x 35
Edition of 125
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

Sold Out – Thank You!

________________

This poster is officially available at the show in SF and LA. I will be making a very limited online release of this poster on Sunday, January 27, 2019 at a random time.

________________

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

2019 was the year we entered “The Post-Truth World.” I’m not buying the ticket to that ride, really-but-really, but it made me think of the eminently Edwardian and irrational — Rasputin — spiritualist, con-man and emotional vampire to the Czar Romanov family. 

Spiritualists were fashionable to the ultra-wealthy oligarchs of the period. Rasputin boasted the mirror-image of a perfect pedigree: a peasant and holy man. His ferrel lack of charm and grace was thrilling to the elite circles he traversed in imperial Russia. Rasputin’s folksy and disarming gnosticism was — I’ll use a word we hear a lot today — “unprecedented.”

Clever and conniving, Rasputin snaked away the patronage of Czarina Alexandra Romanov, empress of Russia, with its ability to bestow wealth and prestige. By degrees, he would hold a nation’s leader mesmerized, and participate in bringing about the self-destruction of Russia’s imperial order. 

Soon the fabulously wealthy dynastic Romanov family would abdicate their empire, be brought down by the Bolsheviks, become prisoners of the revolution, and be bound for bleak incarceration and execution. I guess the moral is: Don’t be a sucker to a con-man.

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