Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), British painter, novelist, and critic. As an artist, Lewis was one of the most prominent experimentalists in Britain, as well as an excellent portraitist. As a writer, critics have compared him to Irish novelist James Joyce.

Lewis was born on a yacht off the North American coast, and after his parents' separation moved to England with his mother in 1893. He was educated at Rugby University and at the Slade School of Art in London from 1898 to 1901. He then lived in Paris and established a reputation among the avant-garde (1901-1909). In 1913 he helped to found the English abstract painting movement called vorticism, which strove toward abstraction coupled with dynamism. Vorticism had similarities with cubism, but was more directly descended from the Italian art movement known as futurism, which preceded vorticism by just a few years.

In 1914 and 1915 Lewis published two issues of BLAST—the Review of the Great English Vortex together with American writer Ezra Pound. During World War I (1914-1918) Lewis served as a gunner and a war artist.

Lewis's novels (Tarr, 1918; The Human Age trilogy, 1928-1955; The Apes of God, 1930) are savagely mocking. As a critic he attacked such prominent British writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as American novelist William Faulkner. In one of the so-called imaginary letters that Lewis wrote to Ezra Pound, published in the Little Review (Chicago, May 1917), Lewis stated “It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite.” Lewis lived in North America during World War II (1939-1945). Parts of an autobiography of Lewis were published as Blasting and Bombadiering (1937) and Rude Assignment (1950). In 1956 the Tate Gallery in London held a retrospective exhibition of his paintings—Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism—but by then Lewis had been blind for several years.