home > personae >

THE ART AND IDEAS OF WYNDHAM LEWIS

PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS was born in 1882 on a yacht off Nova Scotia of an American father and English mother. This beginning is significant. Lewis was to become a key figure of the English intellectual, artistic and literary avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century, and few of this talented circle were English. Lewis was Anglo-American, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot were American, W B Yeats and James Joyce were Irish and Gaudier-Brzeska was French.

In 1888 the family came to England and Lewis attended Rugby and the Slade, both of which asked him to leave. An outsider, he escaped Edwardian England to live a bohemian existence in the artistic capitals of continental Europe. Fired by the examples of Cubism, Futurism and other modernist experiments, he returned to England and an explosive artistic future.

In 1912 Lewis exhibited a portfolio of drawings which had been intended to illustrate an edition of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. These depicted Timon as a snapping puppet. Lewis believed that man could only rise above the beasts by classical detachment and control, and he followed Goethe in distinguishing between 'natures' (the natural men who achieved this) and the vast majority of people who were inevitably puppets or automata. Lewis' 'existentialism' was self-assured - not anguished.

Lewis was originally associated with the Bloomsbury group's Omega Workshop but left after being cheated and swindled by Roger Fry. There were in any case fundamental differences of temperament and outlook, and Lewis was later to satirise the Bloomsburys in The Apes of God (1930).

Lewis subsequently founded, with Kate Lechmere, the Rebel Art Centre. Although this lasted only four months it gave birth to Vorticism and to the first issue of Lewis's magazine Blast. The signatories to the Vorticist Manifesto in Blast included Ezra Pound, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the painter Edward Wadsworth.

While Lewis and those who followed him into the Rebel Art Centre were the creators of Vorticism, it was Ezra Pound who coined the term, articulated its theory and was the chief exponent of the movement. The Vortex was a mystical symbol well known in occult circles. Pound conceived of it as a whirlpool of human imagination and potentialities: "the point of maximum energy".

Pound was fascinated by Chinese ideograms and other forms of oriental art because of their clarity, compression and ability to capture an essence. Pound and Lewis had been influenced by the aesthetic theories of the critic and philosopher T E Hulme who had studied Henri Bergson and Wilhelm Worringer, and had translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence.

Hulme was the prophet of a new classicism and built on Worringer to attack humanist philosophy and romantic art. Hulme was a radical conservative and he equated romanticism with the Rousseauan belief that man was by nature good and open to infinite possibilities.

Lewis was to follow Hulme in viewing the world through the duality of opposites: classicism versus romanticism, art versus life, reason versus emotion, intellect versus intuition, male versus female, aristocratic versus democratic, and fascism versus communism.

Hulme was particularly interested in Lewis' art and predicted: 

As far as one can see, the new "tendency towards abstraction" will culminate, not so much in the simple geometrical forms found in archaic art, but in the more complicated ones associated in our minds with machinery.

Pound and Hulme had first collaborated in the development of the poetic movement known as Imagism, and most writers have regarded Vorticism as a natural development of Imagism.  Although Vorticism was clearly related to Futurism and other forms of machine-age 'Dynamism', Lewis and Pound were keen to assert their independence, and claimed that while they were at the centre of the Vortex, Futurism was only "the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it". In contrast to Futurism, Vorticism aspired not to depict the release of force, but to freeze it in a moment of time. The Vortex was a spring, pregnant with potentialities.

Vorticism was a literary as well as an artistic idea. Vorticist prose, of which Lewis's Nietzschean novel Tarr was the apotheosis, certainly followed Imagism in its verbal economy. It was terse and was characterised by clear visual images. Lewis did not enter, empathetically, into the emotions of his characters, but viewed them externally, as a painter or sculptor.

Lewis had been anxious to create something to leave in case he was killed in the war. After completing Tarr in 1916 he volunteered for the army and served as a forward observation officer in the artillery.

In January 1918 Lewis secured a position as an official war artist. In his first commission, A Canadian Gun Pit (1918), he was obliged to compromise his Vorticist style, but he reasserted it in such works as A Battery Shelled (1919). His drawings and water-colours depicted soldiers as being as machine-like as their artillery pieces. Although this illustrated the de-humanising nature of modern war, it is also another manifestation of Lewis' lifelong preoccupation with the image of men as automata.

It was during the War that Lewis wrote a text which is key to understanding his personality and outlook. Lewis' Nietzschean article 'The Code of a Herdsman' was first published in The Little Review in 1917.

Vorticism, like Futurism, captured the zeitgeist of the pre-war age and was destroyed by the war in which Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska were both killed.

In the period following the first world war Lewis 'went underground', immersing himself in study, and would henceforth become better known as a writer of fiction, criticism, and polemical journalism than as an artist.

In April 1921 Lewis launched his second publication, The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design, of which there were two issues. In the same month he had a exhibition entitled 'Tyros and Portraits'. Lewis had by this time rejected totally abstract art as empty and meaningless.

The 'Tyro' was yet another embodiment of Lewis' puppet metaphor. Tyros were a mythical race of grotesque beings - all teeth and laughter - into which human characteristics could be projected and satirised. (A later example is provided by the hatter's automaton in Lewis' novel Snooty Baronet, 1932).

Vorticism had been only one phase in Lewis's artistic career. He continued to paint in the interwar years and produced some highly successful, if rather more conventional, semi-abstracts including, notably, Red and Black Principle (1936), The Armada (1937), Landscape with Northmen or The Three Norsemen (1936-37), and The Surrender of Barcelona (1934-37).

Lewis was dogged if not degraded by poverty all his life and was resentful of and ungrateful towards his patrons. The tragedy of Lewis was the tragedy of all great artists in an age in which they are obliged to compete in a free market economy geared to the lowest common denominator of mass taste. This no doubt encouraged him to look to a society which endowed the artist and intellectual with power, position and prestige, ideas he developed in The Art of Being Ruled (1926).

Lewis revelled in controversy and antagonistically styled himself as 'The Enemy', an appellation he took for the title of a new magazine of which there were three issues (1927-1929). Lewis' personality was complex. He was charming but also phenomenally rude and treacherous. He was also highly secretive, meeting his friends singly and hiding his marriage for many years. He also had a reputation for paranoia, though he may have exaggerated this for effect.

Although Lewis was at times his own worst enemy, his greatest mistake was to write a sympathetic account of German National-Socialism (Hitler, 1931) in which he naively treated Hitler as someone who would bring peace to Europe. He soon rejected this view and later wrote the ironically entitled book, The Jews, Are They Human? (1939), and The Hitler Cult (1939), but the damage to his career had been done.

In 1939 he went to North America in the hope of escaping the unpopularity he had gained in England. This merely swapped infamy for anonymity and he was forced to scrape along in a hand-to-mouth existence.

He spent some time lecturing at the Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. Lewis was not a believer - at least for the greater part of his life - but had a great deal of respect for Catholicism. Lewis once professed: " I should like to be in Norwich smelling of incense, the pleasing rattle of Latin vibrating on the sullen Protestant air. And monks once more shuffling about the streets."

North America was the scene of a new controversy when Lewis started a campaign against abstract art. Lewis's style and tastes had gradually become more representational and less abstract, and he was strongly opposed to extreme abstraction as came to be represented, for example, by Jackson Pollock and the school of Abstract Expressionists.

While in Canada Lewis again became an official war artist but his sight was deteriorating owing to a tumour, which was eventually to blind him. He returned to England in 1945.

After the Second World War Lewis 'went cosmic' with a vengeance. In reality, of course, Lewis was thoroughly miserable in North America, but in America and Cosmic Man (1948) he extolled American society as the laboratory of the coming world order, specifically because of its rootless anonymity and utilitarianism. The First World War had led Lewis naively to believe that Hitler was a man of peace while the Second World War seems to have changed Lewis the realist into some sort of utopian.

By 1951 blindness had overtaken him but he overcame this affliction to write, amongst other things, two sequels to his Miltonian fantasy The Childermass (1928) which Lewis accomplished as the basis of dramatised radio broadcasts commissioned by D G Bridson of the BBC's Third Programme (now Radio 3). Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta were published as The Human Age in 1955, and it was for these works that Lewis finally wished to be remembered. A second edition of The Childermass was republished in 1956 as Book One of The Human Age. A projected fourth book, The Trial of Man, was never completed.

The Childermass had been essentially a fictional extension of the views Lewis expressed in The Art of Being Ruled. In Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, however, God "replaced the intellect as a final good." It was characteristic of Lewis that he should have second thoughts about his only remaining point of consistency.

In 1957 Lewis died from kidney failure as a result of a urinary disease he had suffered in earlier life.

He is now quite widely acknowledged as England's greatest and most original artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but his writing is more difficult to evaluate. Lewis does not provide an all-encompassing solution to the problem of existence although he seems quite confident to have assumed that role. Those who seek in Lewis a record of devotion to a party line - or even any consistent line - will be disappointed. Besides his capacity for personal antagonism, he was consistent only in his intellectual elitism and even this finally gave way to God. Contradiction was not only implicit in Lewis' life and work but had been explicitly extolled in 'The Code of a Herdsman': "Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up." In the end there was only one constant - the projection of the great Lewis persona.

But what is most valuable in his writing is that amongst all the contradictions and errors, there remain brilliantly perspicacious insights. Lewis was the supreme outsider and, therefore, the voice of alienated rather than rooted elitism. In the context of the modern world, however, it is an understandable position.

Rik Revised: 7 January 1999

HOME | ART | BOOKS | FILMS | MUSIC | MUSIC 2 | PERSONAE | LOCALITY | MISCELLANY | LINKS
editorial | about | gigboard| contact

© FluxEuropa.com