Poignant portrayal of a divisive artist
Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War Imperial War Museum North, Manchester
Sixty years on from his death, Percy Wyndham Lewis remains one of the most controversial British artists of the 20th century. Painter, novelist and founder of Vorticism – Britain’s first truly radical modern art movement – he alienated not only the establishment art world he despised, but most of his fellow avant-gardists, through his bloody-minded megalomania and self-interest. His espousal of fascism in the Thirties ensured that he now rarely figures on lists of great British artists, despite his originality and clear influence on subsequent generations.
Lewis’s largest British exhibition since 1956 should be a major event. The fact that it is taking place in the Imperial War Museum North, rather than, say, Tate Britain, might be seen as a reflection of his problematic status. However, the ostensible reason is Lewis’s appointment as an official war artist in both world wars – his work in the former leading, the show argues, to some of the most powerful images of that conflict.
The exhibition begins in an oddly bitty fashion, with early portraits of Lewis – some by his mentor Augustus John – and works by fellow students at London’s Slade school, and this fragmented impression is compounded by an overloud audiovisual show. Lewis’s early attempts to absorb the influences of Picasso and Matisse were far more forceful, and less genteelly English, than those of his rivals, and you can see this in powerful drawings such as At the Seaside, a satire on the British at play, with its characteristic mixture of hard-edged machine forms and “primitive”, mask-like faces.
But the show’s first impressive work isn’t by Lewis himself: the wonderful The Vorticists in the Café de la Tour Eifel sees a be-hatted Lewis sitting at the centre of the group he founded in 1914, in a lively canvas painted decades after the event by his sometime disciple William Roberts. Roberts’s quirkily cubistic style reflects Vorticism’s aim of celebrating the dynamism of the mechanised world. But the inclusion of works by him and other Vorticists, such as Edward Wadsworth and David Bomberg, dilutes the impact of Lewis’s own work. His major Vorticist painting, The Crowd (1914-15) is a quintessential modernist cityscape, at once euphoric and slightly nightmarish, with asymmetric grid-forms offset by busier cell-like structures, all in rich oranges and yellows. Although this large and audacious painting could have held its own beside anything produced at the time in Paris, Lewis was prevented from further developing this nearabstract direction by the outbreak of the First World War.
Lewis’s first major work after the war, the large A Reading of Ovid, features two red-faced and diabolically smiling figures, a type Lewis referred to as “tyros”, representing what he saw as the “listlessness and triviality” of the post-war era. As a piece of fierce, home-grown surrealism, the work is like nothing else in British – or any other – art. Yet this proved yet another powerful, but aborted trajectory, as Lewis was forced to focus on portraiture simply to survive. The show provides a fair selection of his more interesting portraits in which he fuses classic British elegance with cubist elements. Yet there’s an unmistakable sense of an artist going off the boil and a promise that will never be fulfilled.
We do, however, get a poignant sense of his ultimately pitiful life: ending his days a sorry figure, grateful for the attention of the establishment he had once excoriated. If Lewis can be accused of many things – from fascist apologism to betraying his friends – the most unforgivable was his failure to live up to his formidable talent.
From Friday until Jan 1. Tickets: 0161 836 4000; iwm.org.uk