Early life Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on 18 November 1882, reputedly on his father's yacht off the
Canadian province of
Nova Scotia. His English mother, Anne Stuart Lewis (
née Prickett), and American father, Charles Edward Lewis, separated about 1893. and then, from 16, the
Slade School of Fine Art,
University College London, but left for Paris without finishing his course. He spent most of the 1900s travelling around Europe and studying art in Paris. Whilst there he attended lectures by
Henri Bergson on
process philosophy.
Early work and development of Vorticism (1908–1915) , London) In 1908 Lewis moved to
London, England, where he would reside for much of his life. In 1909 he published his first work, accounts of his travels in
Brittany, in
Ford Madox Ford's
The English Review. He was a founding member of the
Camden Town Group, which brought him into close contact with the
Bloomsbury Group, particularly
Roger Fry and
Clive Bell, with whom he soon fell out. In 1912 he exhibited his work at the second
Post-Impressionist exhibition:
Cubo-Futurist illustrations to
Timon of Athens and three major oil paintings. In 1912 he was commissioned to produce a decorative mural, a drop curtain, and more designs for
The Cave of the Golden Calf, an
avant-garde nightclub and
cabaret on
Heddon Street. From 1913 to 1915 Lewis developed the style of geometric
abstraction for which he is best known today, which his friend
Ezra Pound dubbed "
Vorticism". Lewis sought to combine the strong structure of
Cubism, which he found was not "alive", with the liveliness of
Futurist art, which lacked structure. The combination was a strikingly dramatic critique of modernity. In his early visual works Lewis may have been influenced by Bergson's
process philosophy. Though he was later savagely critical of Bergson, he admitted in a letter to Theodore Weiss (19 April 1949) that he "began by embracing his evolutionary system." The German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche was an equally important influence. Lewis had a brief tenure at Roger Fry's
Omega Workshops, but left after a quarrel with Fry over a commission to provide wall decorations for the
Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, which Lewis believed Fry had misappropriated. He and several other Omega artists started a competing workshop called the
Rebel Art Centre. The Centre operated for only four months, but it gave birth to the Vorticist group and its publication,
Blast. In
Blast Lewis formally expounded the Vorticist aesthetic in a manifesto, distinguishing it from other avant-garde practices. He also wrote and published a play,
Enemy of the Stars. It is a proto-absurdist,
Expressionist drama. The Lewis scholar Melania Terrazas identifies it as a precursor to the plays of
Samuel Beckett.
World War I (1915–1918) , 1917|alt=|left In 1915 the Vorticists held their only British exhibition before the movement broke up, largely as a result of the
First World War. Lewis himself joined up under the
Derby Scheme in March 1916 just before conscription was brought in. He was assigned to the
Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA) and after training was posted to 183rd Siege Battery, RGA, forming at
Weymouth, Dorset, in which he served as a
Bombardier. At the second attempt he was accepted as an officer cadet and went to the cadet school at
Trowbridge before his battery deployed overseas. On completing his officer training he was commissioned as a
2nd Lieutenant and in January 1917 was posted to the newly-raised
330th Siege Battery, RGA. 330th Siege Battery embarked on 24 May 1917 for the
Western Front. It served on the Flanders coast and then at
Ypres during the
Third Ypres offensive. Much of Lewis's time was spent in
Forward Observation Posts looking down at apparently deserted German lines, registering targets and calling down fire from batteries massed around the rim of the
Ypres Salient. He wrote vivid accounts of narrow misses and deadly artillery duels, though not all of these can be corroborated. After the Third Battle of Ypres Lewis was appointed an official
war artist for the
Canadian and
British governments. For the Canadians he painted
A Canadian Gun-pit (1918) from sketches made on
Vimy Ridge. For the British he painted one of his best-known works,
A Battery Shelled (1919), drawing on his own experience at Ypres. Lewis exhibited his war drawings and some other paintings of the war in an exhibition, "Guns", in 1918. Although the Vorticist group broke up after the war, Lewis's patron,
John Quinn, organised a Vorticist exhibition at the Penguin Club in
New York City in 1917. Between 1907 and 1911 Lewis had written what would be his first published novel,
Tarr, which was revised and expanded in 1914–15 and serialised in the London literary magazine
The Egoist from April 1916 to November 1917. It was first published in book form in 1918 by
Alfred A. Knopf in New York and by
The Egoist in London. It is widely regarded as one of the key texts in
literary modernism. Lewis later documented his experiences and opinions of this period of his life in the autobiographical
Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), which covered the time up to 1926.
Tyros and writing (1918–1929) After the war Lewis resumed his career as a painter with a major exhibition,
Tyros and Portraits, at the
Leicester Galleries in 1921. "Tyros" were satirical caricatures intended to comment on the culture of the "new epoch" that succeeded the First World War.
A Reading of Ovid and
Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro are the only surviving oil paintings from this series. Lewis also launched his second magazine,
The Tyro, of which there were only two issues. The second (1922) contained an important statement of Lewis's visual aesthetic: "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our Time". It was during the early 1920s that he perfected his incisive draughtsmanship. By the late 1920s he concentrated on writing. He launched another magazine,
The Enemy (1927–1929), largely written by himself and declaring its belligerent critical stance in its title. The magazine and other theoretical and critical works he published from 1926 to 1929 mark a deliberate separation from the avant-garde and his previous associates. He believed that their work failed to show sufficient critical awareness of those ideologies that worked against truly revolutionary change in the West, and therefore became a vehicle for these pernicious ideologies. His major theoretical and cultural statement from this period is
The Art of Being Ruled (1926).
Time and Western Man (1927) is a cultural and philosophical discussion that includes penetrating critiques of
James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein and
Ezra Pound that are still read. Lewis also attacked the
process philosophy of Bergson,
Samuel Alexander,
Alfred North Whitehead and others. By 1931 he was advocating
the art of
ancient Egypt as impossible to surpass.
Fiction and political writing (1930–1936) |alt=|left In 1930 Lewis published
The Apes of God, a biting satirical attack on the London literary scene, including a long chapter caricaturing the
Sitwell family. The writer
Richard Aldington, however, found it "the greatest piece of
writing since
Ulysses", by
James Joyce. In 1937 Lewis published
The Revenge for Love, set in the period leading up to the
Spanish Civil War and regarded by many as his best novel. It is strongly critical of
communist activity in Spain and presents English intellectual
fellow travellers as deluded. Despite serious illness necessitating several operations, he was very productive as a critic and painter. He produced a book of poems,
One-Way Song, in 1933, and a revised version of
Enemy of the Stars. An important book of critical essays also belongs to this period:
Men without Art (1934). It grew out of a defence of Lewis's satirical practice in
The Apes of God and puts forward a theory of "non-moral", or metaphysical, satire. The book is probably best remembered for one of the first commentaries on
William Faulkner and a famous essay on
Ernest Hemingway.
Return to painting (1936–1941) , 1919. The portrait is lost. After becoming better known for his writing than his painting in the 1920s and early 1930s, he returned to more concentrated work on visual art, and paintings from the 1930s and 1940s constitute some of his best-known work. The
Surrender of Barcelona (1936–37) makes a significant statement about the
Spanish Civil War. It was included in an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1937 that Lewis hoped would re-establish his reputation as a painter. After the publication in
The Times of a letter of support for the exhibition, asking for something from the show to be purchased for the national collection (signed by, among others,
Stephen Spender,
W. H. Auden,
Geoffrey Grigson,
Rebecca West,
Naomi Mitchison,
Henry Moore and
Eric Gill) the
Tate Gallery bought the painting,
Red Scene. Like others from the exhibition, it shows an influence from
Surrealism and
Giorgio de Chirico's
metaphysical painting. Lewis was highly critical of the ideology of Surrealism, but admired the visual qualities of some Surrealist art. During this period Lewis also produced many of his most well-known portraits, including pictures of
Edith Sitwell (
1923–1936),
T. S. Eliot (
1938 and 1949), and
Ezra Pound (
1939). His 1938 portrait of Eliot was rejected by the selection committee of the
Royal Academy for their annual exhibition and caused a furore.
Augustus John resigned in protest.
Second World War and North America (1941–1945) Lewis spent the
Second World War in the United States and Canada. In 1941 in
Toronto he produced a series of
watercolour fantasies centred on themes of creation,
crucifixion and bathing. He grew to appreciate the
cosmopolitan and "rootless" nature of the American
melting pot, declaring that the greatest advantage of being American was to have "turned one's back on race,
caste, and all that pertains to the rooted state." He praised the contributions of
African Americans to American culture, and regarded
Diego Rivera,
David Alfaro Siqueiros and
José Clemente Orozco as the "best North American artists," predicting that when "the
Indian culture of Mexico melts into the great American mass to the North, the Indian will probably give it its art."
The Writer and the Absolute (1952), a book of essays on writers including
George Orwell,
Jean-Paul Sartre and
André Malraux; and the semi-autobiographical novel
Self Condemned (1954). The
BBC commissioned Lewis to complete his 1928 work
The Childermass, which was published as
The Human Age and dramatised for the
BBC Third Programme in 1955. In 1956 the
Tate Gallery held a major exhibition of his work, "Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism", in the catalogue to which he declared that "Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said at a certain period"—a statement which brought forth a series of "Vortex Pamphlets" from his fellow
Blast signatory
William Roberts. == Personal life ==