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Wyndham Lewis: Vorticism and Beyond
| Article
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14432 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
4,603 Words |
| Author
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Jeffrey Meyers
Jeffrey Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
has published a biography of Orwell and Privileged Moments:
Encounters with Writers. His life of Somerset Maugham will be
published by Knopf in February. |
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), whom T.S. Eliot called "the most fascinating personality of our time," passed through a number of distinct physical, temperamental, and artistic changes in his life. His capacity for development was one of the most interesting aspects of his character. In 1888 he left America to become an English schoolboy; in 1902, after a visit to Spain, he became a bohemian; in 1913, when he left Roger Fry's Omega Workshop and founded the school of art known as vorticism, he became a revolutionary painter and writer; and in 1919, changed by war and by illness, he lost his impressive good looks and acquired a darker view of life. In the 1920s he was predominantly a critic of society; in the 1930s a satirist and political pamphleteer. By 1937, after five years of illness, he had aged considerably but demonstrated more sympathy and humanity in his novel The Revenge for Love and in his major portraits of his wife and Eliot. In 1938, after his last trip to Berlin, he regretted his support of fascism and became anti-Nazi. In 1945, after six wearisome years of self-exile in North America, he seemed gentler and more generous, praising young artists and helping Ezra Pound. In 1951, after the barren years of the 1940s, he lost his sight and health but experienced an astonishing creative renaissance.
Lewis' claim that he was "a novelist, painter, sculptor, philosopher, draughtsman, critic, politician, journalist, essayist, pamphleteer, all rolled into one, like one of those portmanteau-men of the Italian Renaissance" suggests his egoistic exaggeration (he was never a sculptor or politician), the range as well as the dissipation of his talents, and the difficulty of defining his contribution to modern English art and literature.
The Rise of Vorticism
Today, Lewis is remembered as the founder of vorticism and as the portraitist of Edith Sitwell, Eliot, and Pound. Vorticism, the first abstract art movement in England, had roots in Cubism and Futurism. It emphasized the importance of African and Polynesian sculpture and used hard, angular, geometric lines. Vorticists typically depicted machinery and the city. Their avowed goal was to employ iron control to portray modern life's underlying explosiveness and classical detachment to capture its strident dynamism, thus reflecting the "steel and stone in the spirit of the artist."
Lewis ventured a rather abstract definition of the movement in the vorticist exhibition catalog of June 1915 and placed himself in diametric opposition to Picasso, the naturalists, and the
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