Wyndham Lewis
in full Percy Wyndham Lewis
born November 18, 1882, on a yacht near
Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada
died March 7, 1957, London, England
English artist and writer who founded the Vorticist movement, which sought to relate
art and literature to the industrial
process.
About 1893 Lewis moved to London with his
mother after his parents separated. At age
16 he won a scholarship to London’s Slade
School of Fine Art, but he left three years
later without completing his course.
Instead, he went to Paris, where he
practiced painting and attended lectures at
the Sorbonne. While in Paris, Lewis became
interested in Cubist and Expressionist art;
he was one of the first British artists to
do so.
On his return to London in 1908, Lewis
began to write satirical stories, and he
developed a style of painting that drew upon
aspects of Cubism and Expressionism. By 1913
he was creating paintings that contained
abstract geometric forms and references to
machines and urban architecture. This style
was named Vorticism, due to Lewis’s belief
that artists should observe the energy of
modern society as if from a still point at
the centre of a whirling vortex. In 1914
Lewis published the first of two numbers of
Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, a
publication that announced the new art
movement in a manifesto attacking Victorian
values. Contributors included the American
Imagist poet Ezra Pound, the French-born
sculptor Jacob Epstein, and the French
sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Lewis’s
writings in this journal show the influence
of Imagist poetry, while his inventive
typography and graphic designs,
characterized by a violent and theatrical
handling of harsh shapes, have much in
common with Futurism, an Italian-based art
movement that glorified speed and the
machine.
In World War I Lewis served at the front
as an artillery officer and then,
commissioned as a war artist, he produced
some memorable paintings and drawings of
battle scenes. An example is A Battery
Shelled (1919), which is representational
yet retains a Vorticist angularity. He wrote
his first novel, Tarr, in 1915 (published in
1918).
After the war Lewis became better known
for his writing than for his visual art,
although he continued to paint portraits and
abstract watercolours. He worked in
seclusion until 1926, when he began to
publish a remarkable series of books: The
Art of Being Ruled (political theory); Time
and Western Man (an attack on subjectivity
and the cult of flux in modern art); The
Lion and the Fox (a study of Shakespeare and
Machiavelli); and The Wild Body (short
stories and essays on satire). In 1930 Lewis
caused a furor in literary London with a
satirical novel, The Apes of God, in which
he scourged wealthy dilettantes.
The 1930s were difficult for Lewis.
Although he produced some of his most noted
paintings, such as The Surrender of
Barcelona (1936) and a portrait of the poet
T.S. Eliot (1938), and wrote some of his
finest books—including Men Without Art
(literary criticism; 1934), Blasting and
Bombardiering (memoirs; 1937), and The
Revenge for Love (a novel; 1937)—he was
deeply in debt by the end of the decade. Two
successful libel actions brought against
Lewis in 1932 had made publishers wary of
him, while his books and articles
championing fascism had lost him many
friends. Though Lewis later stated that he
had made errors of political judgment, his
reputation never recovered.
In 1939 Lewis and his wife journeyed to
the United States, where he hoped to recoup
his finances with a lecture tour and with
portrait commissions. The outbreak of World
War II made their return impossible; after a
brief, unsuccessful stay in New York City,
the couple went to Canada, where they lived
in poverty for three years in a dilapidated
Toronto hotel. Lewis’s 1954 novel,
Self-Condemned, is a fictionalized account
of those years.
At the war’s end, Lewis and his wife
returned home; he became art critic for The
Listener, a publication of the British
Broadcasting Corporation. Until his sight
failed in 1951, Lewis produced a memorable
series of articles for that journal,
praising several young British artists, such
as Michael Ayrton and Francis Bacon, who
later became famous. Lewis also wrote a
second volume of memoirs (Rude Assignment,
1950), satirical short stories (Rotting
Hill, 1951), and the continuation of a
multivolume allegorical fantasy begun in
1928 (The Human Age, 1955–56). A year before
his death he was honoured with a
retrospective exhibition of his art at
London’s Tate Gallery.
