Wyndham Lewis Portraits

Wyndham Lewis Portraits
3 July - 19 October 2008
The National Portrait Gallery
Admission Charge

Most of what Wyndham Lewis did has never been seen, declared Richard Humphreys, co-curator of Wyndham Lewis Portraits, current at the National Portrait Gallery. How, then, did the artist achieve his fame and acclaim? One way to examine the life of Lewis is to compare and contrast him with his contemporary and fellow artist, Pablo Picasso.

Picasso was born in 1881, one year ahead of Lewis, who was born in 1882. Picasso was a Spaniard by birth and Lewis, though American, was brought up in England by his mother. He went to Rugby School and then to the Slade School of Art. Lewis spent most of the 1900s in Paris. Meanwhile Picasso, by now a painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and designer had joined forces with Georges Braque in 1906, painting in the style that we now call cubist. In 1911 Lewis began to paint in the cubist style, no doubt learned from Picasso and Braque, when he was in Paris. That year he also became a founder member of the Camden Town Group. Between 1913 and 1915 he founded vorticism, the style of geometric abstraction for which he is best known today. He also edited Blast, a magazine that defined vorticism. But both magazine and artistic movement were wiped out in the Great War.

In the 1920s and 1930s Lewis became better know for his writing than his painting. Picasso, who had become increasingly interested in surrealism, was exclusively a visual artist. Lewis was noted for his right-wing political views and wrote a book on Adolph Hitler, making light of the dictator’s activities. A copy of the book, Hitler, can be seen at the exhibition, a stylised swastika by Lewis emblazoned on the cover. It was, as Richard Humphreys said, a bad career move. Winston Churchill denounced Lewis, and the Royal Academy refused to exhibit any of his paintings. Picasso, on the other hand, steered clear of letters and poured his political comment onto canvas in the form of Guernica (1937), his response to the Spanish Civil War. This painting had the effect of raising the status of the already wealthy artist to that of demi-god. Meanwhile, the penniless Lewis went to the United States with his wife, Froanna. There he met philosopher Marshall Mcluhan, who had a profound effect upon his literary output. Lewis succumbed to a brain tumour and died in 1957. Only lately has his work been the subject of a revival. The god-like status of the wealthy Picasso has endured since his death in 1973.

In view of his extraordinary vision and skill, the end of Lewis’s life seems rather sad, the more so that only now are we recognising the extent of his contribution to twentieth-century culture. As early as 1911 he denounced Victorianism, wanting to blow all that was old and fusty away. He was quick to recognize his fellow modernists, his men of 1914, and painted their portraits because he knew them; Ezra Pound, James Joyce, TS Elliot, Stephen Spender, GK Chesterton, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West - all their portraits can be seen at the exhibition. In spite of his unfortunate politics, he tried to revive modernism in the inter-war years. And he contributed to twentieth-century literature to an extent that few of his detractors could boast of.

In a nutshell, Lewis was multi-faceted, partaking in a much wide range of activities than ‘straight’ artist Picasso ever did. Much of Lewis’s visual output was non-commercial and indemonstrable, being on sheets of paper rather than the canvases required by institutions like the Royal Academy. But what exactly, was vorticism?

Some analysts have paralleled it with futurism. Here, I quote an extract from Lewis’s poem, Long Live the Vortex, published in Blast, in 1914: Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town. We stand for the Reality of the Present – not for the sentimental Future, or the…past. We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists, ( the latest form of impressionism), and do not depend upon the appearance of the world for our art. WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE and to feel it’s crude energy flowing through us.

Apparently Lewis regarded futurism as being concerned only with the outward form of things, as dismisses all yearnings for the future as ‘sentimental’. But how did ‘crude’ energy manifest in his own paintings? Self-Portrait (1911) is an extraordinary composition, being a conglomerate of geometric shapes; triangles and diamonds that interlock to constitute a face. And this face fronts a personality, exudes emotion; the surreptitious gaze of the eyes, the set of the mouth, the downward cast of the chin. You feel you could get to know this person. The same energy is apparent in his drawings of Ezra Pound (1920) and Dame Rebecca West (1932). Lewis’s linear style was bound to tip over into a cartoon-like caricature and almost does in Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro , another self-portrait done in 1921. However, many of the portraits in the exhibition veer towards orthodoxy. Witness Edith Sitwell (1923-25) in which the subject is seated in a study, surrounded by books. Her eyes are cast down to the book upon her lap, giving her the attitude of a saint in meditation. And the look upon her face is that of intent study, again achieved by Lewis’s inimitable draughtsmanship.

Froanna (Portrait of the Artist’s Wife) (1937), is an orthodox rendition of the subject. Her surroundings are ‘real’. She is seated in an armchair, a tea table by her side. She is fully fleshed and substantial, her vibrant red hair framing her attractive face. In Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Froanna (1944), we see the same subject, by only her face and hands have been rendered realistically. Her body is a line drawing, vapid and unsubstantial against the green background. Yet her presence is a real as in the earlier portrait; her facial expression as she contemplates her knotted hands, her hunched body indicating extreme emotion. After seeing this collection of his paintings I am convinced that it wasn’t just bad politics that hampered the career of Lewis. His paintings do not give us the immediate, almost animal satisfaction of looking at a Picasso. Instead, we perceive them through the haze of his other intellectual ideas – something that may have been off putting when they were first viewed. But this is all the more reason for us to see them now. Do not miss this challenging, exciting exhibition of Lewis’s work.

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