Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1884 - March 7, 1957) was a British painter and author. He was a co-founder of the vorticism movement in art, and edited the vorticists journal, BLAST. His novels include The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955).
Lewis was born on a yacht off the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. His mother was British, his father American. He went to school in England, first at Rugby School, then at the Slade School of art in London, before spending most of the 1900s travelling around Europe and studying art in Paris.
It was in the 1910s that he found the painting style for which he is best known today, a style which his friend Ezra Pound dubbed vorticism. Lewis found the strong structure of cubism painting appealing, but said it did not seem "alive" compared to futurist art, which, conversely, lacked structure. Vorticism is often seen as a combination of these two movements. In these early works Lewis was probably more influenced by the process philosophy of Henri Bergson than he was later prepared to admit.
After the vorticist's only exhibition in 1915, the movement broke up, largely as a result of World War I. Lewis was posted to the western front, and served as Official War Artist, painting one of his best known paintings, A Battery Shelled, while there. His first novel Tarr was published immediately after the war, and is one of the key modernist texts.
By the late 1920s, Lewis was not painting so much, instead concentrating on writing. He wrote biting satirical attacks on the Bloomsbury group, which did not help him to be accepted into the literary world, and his book Hitler (1931), which was distinctly in favour of its subject, caused him to be shunned by many. He later wrote The Hitler Cult (1939), a book which largely went back on his earlier pro-Hitler pronouncements, but the damage was done, and Lewis was to remain an isolated figure. However it was during this period that he wrote The Revenge for Love which some believe to be his best novel. He also wrote some of his best critical books, including 'Men Without Art' (1934) and 'Time and Western Man' (1927), this latter adopting an unambiguously Thomist critique of contemporary literature. The strong influence of Aristotelian metaphysics (via Aquinas) has probably been insufficiently noted in Lewis criticism.
Despite being better known for his writing than his painting in his later years, paintings from the 1930s and 1940s constitute some of his best known work. They are mainly portraits, and include pictures of Edith Sitwell (1935), T. S. Eliot (1938 and again in 1949) and Ezra Pound (1938).
Lewis spent World War II in the United States and Canada. He returned to England following the war. By 1951, he was completely blind, and in 1954 he wrote the autobiographical Rude Assignment. He died in 1957. He had drawn close to Roman Catholicism in his last years, and it is possible that he would have joined the Church had death not intervened.
Further reading
- Schenker, Daniel. (1992) Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press.
