Chuck Sperry

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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.

By

Edwardian Ball 2018 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2018
15 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 LA. I will be making a very limited online release of this poster on Sunday, February 11, 2018 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.

My poster this year is a fanciful portrait of famed New York titan and oligarch, John Jacob Astor IV, with his pregnant, 18 year old, newlywed wife Madeleine — during their deliciously scandalous honeymoon to France and Egypt — on an evening walk outside the Paris Opera sometime before returning to America aboard the Titanic.

The wealthiest man aboard the doomed ship, and with $25,000 cash discovered frozen in his pocket, Astor went down with the ship. A cautionary tale for the Trump Era.

Read more about Chuck Sperry & his newest art book here

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Edwardian Ball 2017 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2017
15 x 35
Edition of 125
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

Sold Out – Thank You!
_______________

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.

This year my poster depicts Cupid & Psyche, the belle of the ball and her accomplice, looking for her next intended target.

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