"This publication accompanies the exhibition 'Wyndham Lewis: Art and War', 25 June - 11 October 1992, Imperial War Museum London." -- t.p. verso

Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882–1957), artist and writer, was born in his father's yacht off Amherst, Nova Scotia, on 18 November 1882. He was the son of Captain Charles Edward Lewis, a soldier who had been educated at West Point and had fought in the American Civil War, and Anne Stuart, a British-born woman with Irish and Scottish ancestors. Captain Lewis came from a wealthy family in New York state, and could have provided his son with a comfortable inheritance. But Lewis's parents separated about 1893, leaving him with his mother. She moved back to England and became largely responsible for his upbringing. They led a precarious life in London, but Lewis was sent to private schools and finally to Rugby School (1897–8). His growing passion for drawing and painting then led him to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1898 and 1901.

Lewis spent the next eight years in an oddly indecisive state. His interest in writing both poetry and prose was developing, and it probably prevented him from committing himself full-time to art. He travelled restlessly, visiting Madrid with his friend Spencer Gore and spending time in Munich. Above all, though, he stayed in Paris for several years. Here he started to paint more seriously, and heard Henri Bergson lecture at the Collège de France. In 1907 his older friend and mentor Augustus John saw Les demoiselles d'Avignon in Picasso's studio. Lewis probably heard about the painting from John, but he was not yet ready to pursue a singlemindedly experimental path. John, already enjoying considerable acclaim in Britain, inhibited Lewis at this stage. He found more satisfaction in writing short stories about the itinerant acrobats and assorted eccentrics he encountered during his travels in Brittany.

Lewis's first success came in 1909, when he returned to London. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) published several of his short stories in a new magazine called the English Review. They established his reputation as a promising young writer of fiction; but the drawings which survive from this period, like The Theatre Manager (1909; V&A), show that Lewis the artist was still caught uneasily between several disparate influences. A growing involvement with so-called primitive art and cubism was married, rather awkwardly, to his interest in Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci's grotesque heads.

By 1912, however, Lewis had decided to devote more of his energies to art. He had already appeared in two exhibitions of the Camden Town Group (June and December 1911), where his interest in harsh distortions marked him out from the other members. But Lewis really began to define his own vision when Madame Strindberg commissioned him to make a monumental painting, a drop curtain, and other designs for her innovative Cabaret Club in London. The club became known as the Cave of the Golden Calf, and other decorations were provided by Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Charles Ginner, and Spencer Gore, who co-ordinated the scheme. Lewis's contributions were outstanding, especially a large painting called Kermesse (1912). Here his alert awareness of cubism, futurism, and expressionism was conveyed in an individual way—bleak, incisive, and charged with ferocious energy. With this arresting canvas of three dancing figures Lewis became a mature painter, and he fortified his reputation when Roger Fry included his illustrations for Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in the ‘Second post-impressionist exhibition’ (1912–13).

Like Timon, Lewis adopted an adversarial stance. Restless, satirical, and ceaselessly productive, he had no patience with most of the art then produced in Britain. His ability as a draughtsman was already outstanding, with a distinctive emphasis on whiplash line. At this stage he admired Filippo Marinetti's forceful advocacy of an art that would match the dynamism of a new century. He also respected Picasso and Matisse, as well as admiring the black harshness of the German expressionist woodcut.

Roger Fry enlisted Lewis's services when the Omega workshops opened in the summer of 1913. He executed a painted screen, some lampshade designs, and studies for rugs, but his dissatisfaction with the Omega soon erupted into antagonism. No longer willing to be dominated by Fry, Lewis abruptly left the Omega with Edward Wadsworth, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Frederick Etchells in October 1913. By the end of the year he had begun to define an alternative to Fry's exclusive concentration on modern French art. His essay for the cubist room section of ‘The Camden Town group and others’ exhibition in Brighton (1913–14) announced the emergence of a more volcanic group of artists, far more involved with the machine age than Fry would ever be. At the same time Lewis carried out a startling decorative scheme for Lady Drogheda's dining-room in Belgravia, shrouding the walls in black, mirrored panels and painting a semi-abstract frieze underneath the ceiling. Its fierce austerity challenged the more gentle mood of the Omega's interiors, and aroused a great deal of

Lewis was fast becoming the most hotly debated young painter in Britain. He established a rival to the Omega when the Rebel Art Centre was founded in March 1914. Many of the artists who allied themselves with the vorticist movement attended the Rebel Art Centre, including Wadsworth, Hamilton, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, and Helen Saunders. Ezra Pound also supported it warmly, and he joined forces with Lewis to bring about the birth of vorticism. The movement finally emerged in the rumbustious magazine Blast (July 1914), which Lewis edited. He wrote many of the essays it contained, and illustrated a wide selection of work by himself and his friends in its large, boldly designed pages. Lewis had by now defined his opposition to Marinetti and the Italian futurists. He objected to the way futurism rhapsodized about the machine age, and he also disapproved of its emphasis on blurred movement. Lewis opted for hardness and clarity of definition in his own art. However explosive his vorticist designs may be, they are always enclosed by decisive contours. The skyscraper forms of the modern city may sway and induce vertiginous sensations, but Lewis insisted on structural lucidity. Vagueness and indistinct forms were abhorrent to him. He wanted his vorticist work to take on some of the character of the machines that fascinated him, and he hoped vorticism would be able to develop an art that made people more aware of the rapidly changing character of modern life.

War
The advent of the First World War frustrated that hope. No sooner had Blast been published than hostilities were declared, and Lewis had very little time left to build on the vorticist initiative. He was able to pursue his interest in large-scale schemes, decorating the study of Ford Madox Ford's London house with blazing red murals, and then devising a complete vorticist room for the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in Percy Street (1915–16). He also organized London's only vorticist exhibition in June 1915, and produced a second issue of Blast (a ‘war number’) at the same time. But the entire country was being overtaken by the escalating war, and in 1916 Lewis joined the army as a gunner. His experiences in the war served him well as subjects for painting. After his appointment as an official war artist, he painted two enormous canvases based on his memories of life in a gun pit, and one of them, A Battery Shelled (1919; IWM), is among his finest achievements. But it revealed at the same time that Lewis was returning to a more representational style, and leaving his vorticist concerns behind. He subsequently came to regard his avant-garde period as ‘a little narrow segment of time, on the far side of World War I. That first war, you have to regard, as far as I am concerned, as a black solid mass, cutting off all that went before it’ (Lewis to James Thrall Soby, 9 April 1947, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 406).

The destructive power of a war dominated by terrible mechanical weapons altered Lewis's attitude towards the machine age. He also felt, in common with many other artists, that he needed to submit himself to the discipline of drawing from life again. His first one-man show, held at the Goupil Gallery in February 1919, contained many drawings of the war in a frankly figurative style. Lewis's move towards a more representational idiom was prompted, too, by his fast-developing interest in writing fiction. His first and most experimental novel, Tarr, was published in 1918, and from then on Lewis devoted an increasing amount of his formidable energy to writing. The exhibition called ‘Group X’, held at the Mansard Gallery in spring 1920, brought together many of the artists formerly associated with vorticism. But it was more of an end than a beginning, and they never again joined forces for group activities. From then on Lewis, the self-styled ‘enemy’, was a man alone.

Collectors as eminent as the New York patron John Quinn continued for a time to support Lewis on a generous scale, and he enjoyed travelling with friends to the continent. During a trip to Paris in 1920 he was introduced to James Joyce by T. S. Eliot, whose early poetry Lewis had published in the second issue of Blast. But these new contacts did not lead to a desire for the formation of another group. When he held the exhibition ‘Tyros and portraits’ at the Leicester Galleries in 1921, the sense of acid satire pervading the work belonged to Lewis alone. The most ambitious painting in the show, a carefully executed canvas called A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) (1920–21; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), is animated by a strain of menacing absurdity. Lewis saw the tyros as elemental creatures, leering embodiments of his comic vision.

No one else in England was painting with this degree of peculiarly remorseless mirth. An unmistakable feeling of isolation and retrenchment pervades Lewis's Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael (1921; City of Manchester Art Galleries), also included in the 1921 show. This is the redoubtable image of a thirty-eight-year-old artist who has decided to stand his ground and remain resolute in the face of any attempt to undermine his defences. The rim of his hat has a blade-like sharpness, signifying Lewis's willingness to wield it against adversaries who come too close. William Rothenstein recalled his astonishment when, meeting Lewis again after several years, he ‘now discovered a formidable figure, armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile, to attack without formal declaration of war’ (W. Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–22, 1932, 378–9). There is a metallic quality about this portrait which recalls Tarr's declaration that ‘the lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see’ (W. Lewis, Tarr, 1918, 354).

Lewis was ready, now, to engage with the physical world in a far more particularized way. He explained that:
the geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. They were still as much present to my mind as ever, but submerged in the coloured vegetation, the flesh and blood, that is life. (Lewis, Rude Assignment, 129)

Portraiture presented an especially stimulating challenge to an artist impelled by this new-found appetite for close observation. Iris Barry, who lived with Lewis for a few years and bore him two children, became a forbidding presence in a large canvas called Praxitella (1920–21; Leeds City Art Gallery). Their relationship was continually riven by conflicts, and this steely painting reflects them. She was a quick-tempered individual who, according to Jeffrey Meyers, ‘could be very amusing or quite truculent, always long on mockery and short on tact’ (Meyers, The Enemy, 90).

With the Sitwells, Lewis enjoyed at first a mutually admiring friendship. Having contributed to the journal Art and Letters, for which Osbert worked, he soon met the brothers and contributed the frontispiece to Sacheverell's Doctor Donne and Gargantua—First Canto in 1921. Lewis was sufficiently interested in Façade to attend two performances, and for a while he regularly accepted Edith's invitations to her tea parties in Pembridge Mansions. When he began work on his celebrated portrait of her (Tate collection) Edith soon realized that she was dealing with a strangely unpredictable and multi-faceted personality, and described how ‘this remarkable man had a habit of appearing in various roles, partly as a disguise … and partly in order to defy his own loneliness’ (V. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: a Unicorn among Lions, 1981, 83). But then she became upset by his behaviour. ‘He was, unfortunately, seized with a kind of schwärmerei for me’, she recalled. ‘I did not respond. It did not get very far, but was a nuisance as he would follow me about’ (E. Salter, The Last Years of a Rebel, 1967, 61). She was probably frightened by his advances, for her biographer Victoria Glendinning has pointed out that ‘this is the only occasion on record when any man is alleged to have shown direct sexual interest in Edith’ (Glendinning, 85). Her termination of their friendship did not, fortunately, prevent Lewis from completing the portrait in 1935. The antagonism which prompted him to lampoon Edith as Lady Harriet in his sprawling satirical novel The Apes of God (1930) did not impair the painting's imperturbable poise. Her trance-like appearance bears out Lewis's declaration, in his ambitious book Time and Western Man (1927), ‘that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation—that it is magic, in short’ (W. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 1927, 198).
The Man of the World
By this time Lewis's pictorial art had dwindled in quantity so much that he referred to his pictures as ‘the fragments I amuse myself with in the intervals of my literary work’ (W. Lewis, ‘A world art and tradition’, Drawing and Design, Feb 1929). After temporarily abandoning the Sitwell portrait in 1923 he did no oil painting for several years, and his production of graphic work also diminished as the decade proceeded. Although Lewis did not publish any books between 1919 and 1926, he was increasingly absorbed in the researching, planning, and execution of an enormous ‘megalo-mastodonic masterwork’ called ‘The Man of the World’. The projected book proved far too ambitious, and he eventually split it up into half a dozen separate volumes: The Art of being Ruled, The Lion and the Fox, Time and Western Man, The Childermass, Paleface, and The Apes of God.

Lewis was permanently short of money, and he perpetually fell out with those most willing to be his patrons. But he managed to visit New York for the first time in 1927, and incorporated references to its vertically thrusting architecture in a painting called Bagdad (1927–8; Tate collection). He also travelled to Morocco and other parts of north Africa in 1931, a year after marrying Gladys Anne Hoskyns, a British art student whose father was a farmer. Her mother was German, and after visiting Germany in 1930 and the following year, Lewis published a disastrously admiring book called Hitler (1931). Although he repudiated his praise in The Hitler Cult (1939), the damage was done. Lewis made even more enemies than before, and when the Royal Academy rejected his portrait of Eliot (Durban Art Gallery, South Africa) in 1938 his notoriety increased. Augustus John resigned from the academy in protest at its hostility to Lewis's work, but Lewis remained a perpetual outsider in the eyes of the British art establishment. Illness dogged him in the 1930s as well, resulting from a gland infection contracted during the First World War. He had a number of serious operations and periods of convalescence, but they did not prevent him publishing one of his most outstanding novels, Revenge for Love, in 1937. Just before the Second World War was declared in 1939, Lewis and his wife left England for six years. They stayed in New York, Buffalo, and Toronto, where he remained until 1943. Then he accepted a year's lectureship at Assumption College, Windsor, Ontario. It proved an unexpectedly happy period, even though he was forced at times to produce mediocre, pot-boiling portraits. But he was in danger of being forgotten, and his reputation only revived after his return to London in 1945.

His appointment as The Listener's art critic the following year was felicitous, enabling Lewis to demonstrate his remarkable responsiveness to emergent artists as well as his contemporaries. He exerted a wide influence, and his Listener column was terminated only when blindness afflicted him in 1951. Visitors to his retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery two years before knew how much of a loss he was to British art, but Lewis was awarded a civil-list pension and continued to write fiction with undiminished energy. Self Condemned, one of his finest novels, appeared in 1954, and in the same year he published The Demon of Progress in the Arts, a polemic which showed how far his attitude towards aesthetic extremism had altered since his early vorticist days. In the following year his trilogy The Human Age was broadcast on the BBC's Third Programme, uniting The Childermass (1928) with two succeeding parts commissioned by the BBC in 1951: Monstre gai and Malign Fiesta. They were his literary swansong, and his achievements as an artist were celebrated in 1956 by a large retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery called ‘Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism’. The show was staged just in time: he died in the Westminster Hospital, London, on 7 March 1957.

Richard Cork, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography