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biographer D. B. Wyndham Lewis


Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 - March 7, 1957)
was a Britain|British painter and author. He was a
co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and
edited the Vorticists' journal,
BLAST_(journal)|BLAST (two numbers, 1914-15). His
novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr
(set in Paris),and The Human Age, a trilogy
comprising The Childermass (1928),  Monstre Gai
and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the
afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The
Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a
fragmentary state at the time of his death.   

Lewis was born on a yacht off the Canada|Canadian
province of Nova Scotia. His mother was British,
his father American. He was educated in England,
first at Rugby School, then at the Slade School of
Art in London, before spending most of the 1900s
travelling around Europe and studying art in
Paris.

It was in the years 1913-15 that he found the
painting style for which he is best known today, a
style which his friend Ezra Pound dubbed
Vorticism. Lewis found the strong structure of
Cubist painting appealing, but said it did not
seem "alive" compared to futurism (art)|Futurist
art, which, conversely, lacked structure.
Vorticism combined these two movements in a
strikingly dramatic critique of modernity. In his
early works, particularly versions of village life
in Brittany showing dancers (ca. 1910-12), Lewis
was probably more influenced by the process
philosophy of Henri Bergson than he was later
prepared to admit. 

After the Vorticists' only exhibition in 1915, the
movement broke up, largely as a result of World
War I. Lewis was posted to the western front, and
served as an Official War Artist 1917-1919,
painting one of his best known works, A Battery
Shelled, from sketches made on Vimy Ridge. His
first novel Tarr was published in 1918, and is one
of the key modernist texts. 

By the late 1920s, Lewis was not painting so much,
instead concentrating on writing. His major
theoretical and cultural statement from this
period is The Art of Being Ruled (1926, ed.
Dasenbrock, 1989). Time and Western Man (1927)is a
cultural and philosophical discussion that
includes a penetrating critique of James Joyce
which is still read. Philosophically, Lewis
attacked the "time philosophy" of Bergson,
Alexander and others.

In The Apes of God (1930) he wrote a biting
satirical attack on the Sitwell family, which did
not help him to be accepted into the literary
world, and his book Hitler (1931), which was
insufficiently critical  of its subject even at
this early date, caused him to be shunned by many.
 He later wrote The Hitler Cult (1939), a book
which firmly revoked his earlier willingness to
entertain Hitler, but the damage was done, and
Lewis was to remain an isolated figure. In the
1930s Auden called him "that lonely old volcano of
the Right."

However it was during the years 1934-37 that he
wrote The Revenge for Love (1937), about the
period before the Spanish Civil War. Still in
print, it is widely regarded as his best novel. An
outstanding book of critical essays belongs to
this period; entitled Men Without Art (1934), it
includes one of the first commentaries on William
Faulkner, and a famous essay on Hemingway.  

Despite being better known for his writing than
his painting in his later years, paintings from
the 1930s and 1940s constitute some of his
best-known work. They are mainly portraits, and
include pictures of Edith Sitwell (1935), T. S.
Eliot (1938 and again in 1949) and Ezra Pound
(1938). The Surrender of Barcelona (1936-38) makes
a significant statement about the Spanish Civil
War.

Lewis spent World War II in the United States and
Canada. He returned to England in 1945. By 1951,
he was completely blindness|blind. In 1950 he
published the autobiography|autobiographical Rude
Assignment, and followed it with the
semi-autobiograpical novel Self Condemned, a major
late statement. He died in 1957. Always interested
in Roman Catholicism, he nevertheless never
converted. In recent years there has been a
renewal of critical and biographical interest in
Lewis and his work, and he is now regarded as a
major British artist and writer of the twentieth
century. 

==Further reading==

* Edwards, Paul. (2000) Wyndham Lewis, Painter and
Writer. New Haven and London: Yale U P.
* Gasiorek, Andrzej (2004) Wyndham Lewis and
Modernism. Tavistock: Northcote House.

* O'Keeffe, Paul (2000) Some Sort of Genius: A
Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Cape.

* Schenker, Daniel. (1992) Wyndham Lewis: Religion
and Modernism. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press.

==External Links==

*http://www.wyndhamlewis.com/ Official Wyndham
Lewis Website

*http://www.time-space.net/wynlewis/ Website of
the Official Wyndham Lewis Society