Wyndham Lewis rehabilitated
One of the 20th century’s most intriguing – but politically toxic – British artists is getting a show. About time, says Andrew Lambirth
Sixty years have elapsed since Wyndham Lewis’s death, and we still don’t really know how to place him or deal with him – as artist, cultural provocateur or writer. He was both writer and artist in equal measure, a twin gift given to few (though his near contemporary David Jones springs to mind), and that doubled creativity always gives critics and commentators pause.
How to categorise him? As a writer who paints, or as a painter who writes? While the panjandrums deliberated, Lewis, impatient of such shilly-shallying, would have written the next novel or philosophical-critical tract, or drawn a dozen portraits.
But his diversity has told against him. Not content to occupy a single pigeonhole and thus make his career easily comprehensible to even the meanest critical intelligence, Lewis confounded his detractors, but delighted his supporters, by spreading himself unfashionably wide.
Neglect has been the main result. His books are little read, and despite a rather good exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008, his visual work is not familiar to the general public. Few examples come to the salesrooms and commercial galleries because he was not prolific.
It is thus much to the credit of the Imperial War Museum that it should now organise the largest retrospective of Lewis’s work yet in this country. But it is also a measure of the potentially troublesome (and conceivably anti-popular) nature of the subject that the exhibition has been relegated to the Manchester branch of the museum, and will not be shown in London.
This year is the centenary of the Imperial War Museum, and the Lewis show is intended to celebrate that as well as mark one hundred years since he was commissioned as an official war artist.
More than 160 paintings, drawings, books, journals and pamphlets have been brought together to give an account of his achievement; not just war art, but good examples of his work from all periods. So there will be life drawings from his time as a Slade student, his early Cubist work ‘Sunset Among the Michelangelos’ (c 1912), ‘The Crowd’, an abstract-figurative masterpiece from 1914–15, and his great war painting ‘A Battery Shelled’. Portraits include Ezra Pound, Naomi Mitchison and Edith Sitwell, a magisterial self-depiction of 1921, and a painting of his wife from 1937. Another key painting is ‘The Surrender of Barcelona’ (1934–37), less about the Spanish Civil War than Spain’s military and imperial past, offering a context for current discontents.
Lewis himself seems to have lived perpetually on a war footing. He insisted on sitting with his back to the wall in restaurants in case an enemy should creep up on him. His figures (as distinct from his portraits) are often embattled as well as mechanised, helmeted and apparently armed, even when supposed to be indulging in leisure pursuits at the seaside.
This is the theme which runs through so much of his work. In the introduction to his memoir, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Lewis wrote, ‘You will be astonished to find how like art is to war, I mean “modernist” art. They talk a lot about how a war just-finished affects art. But you will learn here how a war about to start can do the same thing. I have set out to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coups d’états dovetail into each other.’
Perhaps the best-known fact about Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) is that he founded Vorticism, often trumpeted as Britain’s only international and avantgarde art movement. To launch it, he published a large periodical called Blast, in which he and his friends set forth their beliefs – alternately Blasting and Blessing everything they disapproved, or occasionally approved, of in contemporary England.
Published in June 1914, Blast was badly timed. Vorticism was an immensely promising movement, which borrowed from Cubism and Futurism but had a heart and soul of its own. It included such powerful artists as Gaudier-brzeska, Epstein, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth, but was unsurprisingly short-lived.
The Vorticists held only one exhibition, in 1915, before the war drove them apart. The machine ethic they espoused looked decidedly less attractive after the butchery of millions by mortar shells and machine guns. When the war was finally over, the
angular abstraction of Vorticism was no longer to the point; people longed for art that was gentler and more humanistic.
If Lewis’s moment of greatness centre-stage had passed by 1920, he remained a figure of such colossal talent – some would say genius – that it was impossible to ignore him. He was intensely provocative, a contrarian by nature, full of awkward but often unexpectedly illuminating ideas and observations, who saw it as his duty to be actively in opposition to received opinion.
He was a determinedly independent thinker – another reason for his unpopularity – and never tried to curry favour with the Establishment. He was vigorously anti-communist and, in later life, Auden called him ‘that lonely old volcano of the Right’. (By contrast, Lewis described himself as ‘the most broadminded “Left-winger” in England’).
In 1931, Lewis came out as pro-hitler, which was very early to recognise the Führer’s capabilities, even if erring on the wrong side. In 1937, he visited Germany and changed his mind and, in the following two years, denounced both Hitler and anti-semitism, but his previous support of fascism branded him a traitor and many never forgave him for it. Lewis’s reputation suffered a further blow when he decamped to Canada in the Second World War, in the wake of the scandal surrounding the rejection by the Royal Academy of his masterly halflength portrait of T S Eliot.
The Royal Academy’s Selection Committee took offence at what it considered an unnecessarily phallic scroll in the painting’s background, and refused to hang the portrait in its Summer Exhibition. Augustus John, trusty friend of Lewis, was so outraged he resigned from the Academy. The portrait is one of Lewis’s best, depicting the introspective, haunted-looking poet in blue three-piece suit, handkerchief protruding from breast pocket. It is little seen in England. Durban Municipal Art Gallery acquired it for £250.
Lewis was no stranger to controversy (he founded the Rebel Art Centre in rivalry to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops before he championed Vorticism), but his very real achievement as both artist and writer has suffered because of his taste for conflict. It’s about time we looked seriously at his pictures and re-read his books, and if the substantial exhibition at IWM North helps encourage that, then all praise to its organisers. Wyndham Lewis has for too long been a kind of cultural bogeyman, a skeleton in the cupboard. Time to flesh him out and bid him to the feast.