Wyndham Lewis and Angularity
Some consider Wyndham Lewis the best British painter of the first half of the 20th century, yet he’s not celebrated a great deal. I wonder how much that is because of his politics, which were fascist-friendly. Or perhaps he managed to alienate too many people in his aggressive critical writings in BLAST! the Vorticist magazine he edited.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 1882 – 1957 was the son of a British mother and a wealthy American father and came to England as a child, studied at the Slade School, then lived in Europe for seven years, mostly in Paris.
In 1909 he returned to England, and emerged as the most original and idiosyncratic of the major British artists working in the first decades of the 20th century.
He was among the first artists in Europe to produce completely abstract paintings and drawings.
For me, he was at his best when he applied his angular abstraction to well-observed figurative drawing and painting.
This strength of style made him one of the best portraitists of that period.
Lewis led a short-lived but influential movement called Vorticism in 1914. The journal “Blast“, published only twice (in 1914 and 1915) proclaimed the Vorticist Manifesto and supplied publicity for the movement. But it was all stymied by the outbreak of WW1 and only one Vorticist exhibition was ever held.
The name Vorticism – referring to the emotional vortex which was considered to be the necessary source of artistic creation – was coined by his fellow-American (and Nazi-sympathiser) the poet Ezra Pound.
Some of Lewis’s work was semi-abstract, some pieces went over completely to the dark side, embracing full abstraction:
Lewis served in the War with the Royal Artillery and, like Paul Nash, was an Official War Artist.
After the War he devoted himself mainly to writing, in which he often made savage attacks on his contemporaries (particularly the Bloomsbury Group).
He enjoyed making enemies. So presumably he didn’t mind that his association with the British Fascist Party and his praise of Hitler completely alienated him from the literary world.
But it is his art that stands the test of time. He built his personal style on features taken from Cubism and Futurism but did not accept either. He accused Cubism of failure to “synthesize the quality of life with the significance or spiritual weight that is the mark of all the greatest art” and of being mere visual acrobatics.
The Futurists, he wrote, had the vivacity that the Cubists lacked, but they themselves lacked the grandness and the “great plastic qualities” that Cubism achieved.
His own work, he declared, was “electric with a mastered and vivid vitality.”
That’s really interesting John. I knew it was Edith Sitwell even without a good likeness, picture is more than just likeness.
Lewis seems an awful person that produced awfully brilliant art.