Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was a Canadian-born British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited Blast, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.
His novels include Tarr and The Human Age trilogy, comprising The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. A fourth volume, The Trial of Man, remained unfinished upon his death. He wrote two autobiographical volumes: Blasting and Bombardiering and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date.
Life and career
Early life
Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on 18 November 1882, reputedly on his father's yacht off the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. His English mother, Anne Stuart Lewis, and American father, Charles Edward Lewis, separated about 1893. His mother subsequently returned to England. Lewis was educated in England at Rugby School and then, from 16, the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, but left for Paris without finishing his course. He spent most of the 1900s travelling around Europe and studying art in Paris. Whilst there he attended lectures by Henri Bergson on process philosophy.Early work and development of Vorticism (1908–1915)
In 1908 Lewis moved to London, England, where he would reside for much of his life. In 1909 he published his first work, accounts of his travels in Brittany, in Ford Madox Ford's The English Review. He was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, which brought him into close contact with the Bloomsbury Group, particularly Roger Fry and Clive Bell, with whom he soon fell out.In 1912 he exhibited his work at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition: Cubo-Futurist illustrations to Timon of Athens and three major oil paintings. In 1912 he was commissioned to produce a decorative mural, a drop curtain, and more designs for The Cave of the Golden Calf, an avant-garde nightclub and cabaret on Heddon Street.
From 1913 to 1915 Lewis developed the style of geometric abstraction for which he is best known today, which his friend Ezra Pound dubbed "Vorticism". Lewis sought to combine the strong structure of Cubism, which he found was not "alive", with the liveliness of Futurist art, which lacked structure. The combination was a strikingly dramatic critique of modernity. In his early visual works Lewis may have been influenced by Bergson's process philosophy. Though he was later savagely critical of Bergson, he admitted in a letter to Theodore Weiss that he "began by embracing his evolutionary system." The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an equally important influence.
Lewis had a brief tenure at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, but left after a quarrel with Fry over a commission to provide wall decorations for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, which Lewis believed Fry had misappropriated. He and several other Omega artists started a competing workshop called the Rebel Art Centre. The Centre operated for only four months, but it gave birth to the Vorticist group and its publication, Blast. In Blast Lewis formally expounded the Vorticist aesthetic in a manifesto, distinguishing it from other avant-garde practices. He also wrote and published a play, Enemy of the Stars. It is a proto-absurdist, Expressionist drama. The Lewis scholar Melania Terrazas identifies it as a precursor to the plays of Samuel Beckett.
World War I (1915–1918)
In 1915 the Vorticists held their only British exhibition before the movement broke up, largely as a result of the First World War. Lewis himself joined up under the Derby Scheme in March 1916 just before conscription was brought in. He was assigned to the Royal Garrison Artillery and after training was posted to 183rd Siege Battery, RGA, forming at Weymouth, Dorset, in which he served as a Bombardier. At the second attempt he was accepted as an officer cadet and went to the cadet school at Trowbridge before his battery deployed overseas. On completing his officer training he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and in January 1917 was posted to the newly-raised 330th Siege Battery, RGA. 330th Siege Battery embarked on 24 May 1917 for the Western Front. It served on the Flanders coast and then at Ypres during the Third Ypres offensive. Much of Lewis's time was spent in Forward Observation Posts looking down at apparently deserted German lines, registering targets and calling down fire from batteries massed around the rim of the Ypres Salient. He wrote vivid accounts of narrow misses and deadly artillery duels, though not all of these can be corroborated.After the Third Battle of Ypres Lewis was appointed an official war artist for the Canadian and British governments. For the Canadians he painted A Canadian Gun-pit from sketches made on Vimy Ridge. For the British he painted one of his best-known works, A Battery Shelled, drawing on his own experience at Ypres. Lewis exhibited his war drawings and some other paintings of the war in an exhibition, "Guns", in 1918. Although the Vorticist group broke up after the war, Lewis's patron, John Quinn, organised a Vorticist exhibition at the Penguin Club in New York City in 1917.
Between 1907 and 1911 Lewis had written what would be his first published novel, Tarr, which was revised and expanded in 1914–15 and serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist from April 1916 to November 1917. It was first published in book form in 1918 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York and by The Egoist in London. It is widely regarded as one of the key texts in literary modernism.
Lewis later documented his experiences and opinions of this period of his life in the autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering, which covered the time up to 1926.
''Tyros'' and writing (1918–1929)
After the war Lewis resumed his career as a painter with a major exhibition, Tyros and Portraits, at the Leicester Galleries in 1921. "Tyros" were satirical caricatures intended to comment on the culture of the "new epoch" that succeeded the First World War. A Reading of Ovid and Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro are the only surviving oil paintings from this series. Lewis also launched his second magazine, The Tyro, of which there were only two issues. The second contained an important statement of Lewis's visual aesthetic: "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our Time". It was during the early 1920s that he perfected his incisive draughtsmanship.By the late 1920s he concentrated on writing. He launched another magazine, The Enemy, largely written by himself and declaring its belligerent critical stance in its title. The magazine and other theoretical and critical works he published from 1926 to 1929 mark a deliberate separation from the avant-garde and his previous associates. He believed that their work failed to show sufficient critical awareness of those ideologies that worked against truly revolutionary change in the West, and therefore became a vehicle for these pernicious ideologies. His major theoretical and cultural statement from this period is The Art of Being Ruled.
Time and Western Man is a cultural and philosophical discussion that includes penetrating critiques of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound that are still read. Lewis also attacked the process philosophy of Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead and others. By 1931 he was advocating the art of ancient Egypt as impossible to surpass.
Fiction and political writing (1930–1936)
In 1930 Lewis published The Apes of God, a biting satirical attack on the London literary scene, including a long chapter caricaturing the Sitwell family. The writer Richard Aldington, however, found it "the greatest piece of writing since Ulysses", by James Joyce. In 1937 Lewis published The Revenge for Love, set in the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and regarded by many as his best novel. It is strongly critical of communist activity in Spain and presents English intellectual fellow travellers as deluded.Despite serious illness necessitating several operations, he was very productive as a critic and painter. He produced a book of poems, One-Way Song, in 1933, and a revised version of Enemy of the Stars. An important book of critical essays also belongs to this period: Men without Art. It grew out of a defence of Lewis's satirical practice in The Apes of God and puts forward a theory of "non-moral", or metaphysical, satire. The book is probably best remembered for one of the first commentaries on William Faulkner and a famous essay on Ernest Hemingway.
Return to painting (1936–1941)
After becoming better known for his writing than his painting in the 1920s and early 1930s, he returned to more concentrated work on visual art, and paintings from the 1930s and 1940s constitute some of his best-known work. The Surrender of Barcelona makes a significant statement about the Spanish Civil War. It was included in an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1937 that Lewis hoped would re-establish his reputation as a painter. After the publication in The Times of a letter of support for the exhibition, asking for something from the show to be purchased for the national collection the Tate Gallery bought the painting, Red Scene. Like others from the exhibition, it shows an influence from Surrealism and Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting. Lewis was highly critical of the ideology of Surrealism, but admired the visual qualities of some Surrealist art.During this period Lewis also produced many of his most well-known portraits, including pictures of Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. His 1938 portrait of Eliot was rejected by the selection committee of the Royal Academy for their annual exhibition and caused a furore. Augustus John resigned in protest.