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TS Eliot (1938) |
Wyndham Lewis and a Naïve Blast into the future
Gerald Isaaman explains how
Wyndham Lewis’s
challenge to the art world was
compromised by his gullibility
WYNDHAM Lewis was a mixed up man – brilliant people often are when it comes to human relationships.
Yet Lewis brought to the early years of the 20th century a challenge of change to our art and literature recognised today as a truly formidable force.
And you can see that in the current exhibition of Wyndham Lewis Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, a small and significant show that exemplifies the clear-cut vision of innovation he advocated in his amazing magazine called Blast.
And he loved to laugh too, creating the Tyros, a race of “laughing elementals” for purely satirical purposes – all part of his distinctive and dynamic art movement Vorticism. His message shouts out at you when you confront the exhibition’s initial self-portrait of the grinning Wyndham as you enter the gallery (see cover of The Review).
Indeed, the gallery postcard of Lewis’s most famous portrait, that of the poet TS Eliot who taught at Highgate School in his early years in England, has already sold out and awaiting a new supply, such is the interest this exciting exhibition has produced.
But then the unexpected portrait of suave Eliot, dressed in smart business suit, hit the headlines the moment it was rejected for exhibition by the Royal Academy in 1938, allegedly because one of the background scrolls depicted a phallic form that is hardly noticeable, unless you are seeking it.
Augustus John resigned from the Academy in protest, thus adding to the notoriety of the portrait, which has a magnetic hold on those who stand before it. The same can be said for Lewis’s portrait of the poet Edith Sitwell, who spent her last years in Hampstead. Her heavy hooded eyes – and the lack of hands – has the same remarkable majestic effect.
However, on a more subtle level, Lewis’s drawings have a much more sensitive feel, which you can discover in his black chalk portrait of Mary Webb, the novelist who wrote her bestseller Precious Bane while living in Hampstead. A thyroid disorder gave her bulging eyes, so Lewis shows her as the Girl Looking Down, strands of hair hiding her big eyes.
What is particularly fascinating is that the portraits concentrate on Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, the key American and Irish figures in Lewis’s fabulously talented circle of cutting-edge outsiders – Lewis himself, with an American father and English mother, having been born in 1882 on a yacht off Nova Scotia.
He considered, as did Pound, that the Vortex, a mystical symbol from the occult, provided an innate energy to change the future path of art. So it is no wonder he hated the Bloomsbury Group, whom he satirised in his 1930 book The Apes of God, and upset many others with his aggressive attitudes and controversial polemics in a growing complex age of powerful machines.
His great mistake was to laud Hitler, naively believing his aim was to bring peace to Europe. It forced him to leave England for America. When he did return, in 1951, his political views dramatically changed, blindness had almost overcome him and he died in 1957, respected but unloved.
The prospect of blindness must have haunted him. He prophesied: “Pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked forever, I shall have to light the lamp of aggressive voltage in my mind to keep at bay the night.”
The fact that this exhibition is the first to bring Lewis’s portraits together makes it all the more poignant and worthwhile.
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