Lewis, Wyndham (1882–1957). British painter, novelist, and critic, born of a British mother and a wealthy American father on their yacht off Nova Scotia. He came to England as a child, studied at the Slade School, 1898–1901, then lived on the Continent for seven years, mostly in Paris (although he travelled widely). During this period he became one of the first British artists to become familiar with
Cubism and
Expressionism, but little of his work of this time survives. In 1908 he returned to England and in the years leading up to the First World War emerged as one of the leading figures in British avant-garde art. From 1911 he developed an angular, machine-like, semi-abstract style that had affinities with
Futurism as well as Cubism. He worked for a short time at Roger
Fry's Omega Workshops, but after quarrelling with Fry in 1913 he formed the
Rebel Art Centre, from which grew
Vorticism, a movement of which he was the chief figure and whose journal
Blast he edited. He served with the Royal Artillery, 1915–17, and as an Official War Artist, 1917–18, carrying his Vorticist style into paintings such as
A Battery Shelled (Imperial War Museum, London, 1918), which is regarded as one of his finest works. In 1919 he founded
Group X as an attempt to revive Vorticism, but this failed, and from the late 1920s he devoted himself mainly to writing, in which he often made savage attacks on his contemporaries (particularly the
Bloomsbury Group).
Lewis's association with the British Fascist Party and his praise of Hitler alienated him from the literary world, and his biographer Jeffrey Meyers (
The Enemy, 1980) describes him as ‘one of the loneliest figures in the intellectual world of the thirties'; earlier W. H. Auden had called him ‘that lonely old volcano of the right'. The best-known paintings of his later years are his incisive portraits, more naturalistic than his earlier works but still with a bold, hard simplification of form; the rejection of that of T. S. Eliot (Durban Art Gallery) by the hanging committee of the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1938 caused Augustus
John (a longstanding friend of Lewis) to resign from the Academy in disgust. During the Second World War Lewis lived in the USA and Canada. After his return to London he was art critic of the
Listener from 1946 until 1951 (the artists he supported included
Bacon and
Colquhoun). By the time he stopped working for the
Listener he was almost blind, but he wrote the introduction for the catalogue of the exhibition ‘ Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists’ held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1956. When the director of the Tate, John
Rothenstein, went to discuss the planning of the exhibition with him, he found it ‘a sad experience to see the powerful, militant personage I so clearly remembered … so utterly reduced … his energy ebbed away'.
Lewis was the most original and idiosyncratic of the major British artists working in the first decades of the 20th century, and he was among the first artists in Europe to produce completely abstract paintings and drawings. He built his 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’ His writings include novels, poetry, collections of essays and criticism, and the autobiographical
Blasting and Bombadiering (1937) and
Rude Assignment (1950).
Wyndham Lewis the Artist (1939) contains a survey by Lewis of his career as a painter.
