Wyndham Lewis Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on 18 November 1882, reportedly on his father's yacht off Amherst, Nova Scotia, to a British father and an American mother. He spent much of his childhood in England and on the continent, an early mobility that fed his cosmopolitan imagination. In London he entered the Slade School of Fine Art at the end of the 1890s, where he studied under Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown. He absorbed drawing discipline and a respect for figure construction that would remain visible even as his art became aggressively modern. After leaving the Slade he worked and traveled in Europe, especially Paris, encountering the shock of Post-Impressionism and the experiments of Cubism. Those encounters convinced him that a new, harder-edged language would be needed to depict a mechanized age.

From Post-Impressionism to a New Aesthetic
By the early 1910s Lewis was active in London's avant-garde. He briefly joined Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, collaborating with figures such as Vanessa Bell, but a quarrel over credit and direction precipitated a split. In response he set up the Rebel Art Centre in 1914 with a circle of allies, announcing a more aggressive alternative to the soft, domestic stylings he associated with Bloomsbury. In intense conversations with the poet Ezra Pound and the philosopher-critic T. E. Hulme, Lewis honed a program that fused the energy of Futurism with the structural intelligence of Cubism. Out of this came Vorticism, the British avant-garde he led, whose members included Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Cuthbert Hamilton.

BLAST and the Vorticist Moment
In 1914 Lewis launched BLAST, the movement's manifest journal, famous for its magenta cover and its lists that blasted and blessed the cultural status quo. Pound contributed, Gaudier-Brzeska supplied fierce statements of sculptural intent, and Lewis himself orchestrated the polemical tone. The second issue appeared in 1915, shadowed by the outbreak of war and the death of Gaudier-Brzeska at the front. Vorticism, poised to become a sustained program, was instead checked by history, its momentum fragmented by enlistments and loss.

War Service and Official War Artist
Lewis served as an artillery officer on the Western Front, an experience that sharpened both his satire and his geometry. In 1917 he was appointed an official war artist, working for British and Canadian commissions. From this period come major canvases such as A Battery Shelled and A Canadian Gun Pit, where angular forms and flattened color register the method and terror of mechanized warfare. These works established him as a painter who could address public subjects without sacrificing formal invention.

Novelist and Critic
During and after the war Lewis turned with equal ambition to literature. Tarr, serialized in The Egoist and published in book form in 1918 (with a revised edition in 1928), offered a corrosive portrait of artists and poseurs in Paris. In the 1920s he founded the short-lived journal The Tyro and later The Enemy, platforms for his combative criticism. A sequence of books made him a central, if controversial, modernist theorist: The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Lion and the Fox (1927), Time and Western Man (1927), and Paleface (1929). He engaged vigorously with the literary landscape, sparring with the legacies of James Joyce and the stream-of-consciousness novel while publishing essays in T. S. Eliot's Criterion. The Apes of God (1930) satirized the London art-and-letters world, with the Sitwells among those who recognized themselves in its pages. Later novels included The Revenge for Love (1937), a morally charged narrative set against the politics of the decade. He also produced autobiographical volumes, notably Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment (1950).

Painting Between the Wars
Even as he wrote, Lewis painted portraits of remarkable force. His likenesses of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are among the signature images of literary modernism, translating temperament into faceted planes. He produced major portraits such as Praxitella (a stylized portrait of Iris Barry), and a searching series of paintings of his partner and later wife, known as Froanna. The disciplined line he had mastered at the Slade coupled with the Vorticist taste for hard edges made his portraiture both exacting and psychologically charged.

Politics and Controversy
The 1930s brought political storms. In 1931 Lewis published a study of Adolf Hitler that underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. He later repudiated that misjudgment in The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939) and, in The Jews, Are They Human? (1939), mounted a clear defense of Jewish humanity against racist propaganda. His positions strained friendships and drew him into sharp disagreements, not least because Ezra Pound moved in the opposite direction, but Lewis's later writings demonstrate an explicit rejection of fascism and a critique of totalitarian thinking of all kinds. Men Without Art (1934) and other essays continued his wider argument about the responsibilities of art in a mass society.

Exile in North America
At the start of the Second World War Lewis left Britain for North America, spending extended periods in the United States and Canada. He lectured, wrote criticism, and struggled with precarious finances while keeping up a correspondence with allies in London, including Eliot. The North American years pressed into his fiction and essays: Self-Condemned (1954) draws on his Canadian sojourn, while America and Cosmic Man (1948) considers the United States as a crucible for a future, potentially more democratic civilization. He continued to paint when circumstances allowed, but writing became increasingly central.

Late Years, Blindness, and Legacy
Lewis returned to London after the war. In the early 1950s he began to lose his sight due to illness and was effectively blind by mid-decade. With the assistance of Froanna he continued to dictate ambitious literary projects, completing two further volumes of his afterlife saga The Human Age, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both published in 1955 to join The Childermass (1928). He died in London on 7 March 1957.

Wyndham Lewis stands at the intersection of British painting and modernist letters, a polemicist whose severity could alienate yet whose originality commanded respect. His leadership of Vorticism gave Britain its most coherent avant-garde of the early twentieth century, while his portraits fixed the visages of contemporaries like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound with emblematic clarity. As a critic he argued with Bloomsbury orthodoxies shaped by Roger Fry and with the narrative experiments of Joyce, insisting that modern art retain an intellectual spine amid a turbulent century. If his political judgments sometimes faltered, his later recantations and defenses attest to a restless conscience. The cumulative achievement, across canvases and pages, is a body of work that rendered the forms of modern life with unsparing intelligence and a distinctive, angular grace.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Wyndham, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Art - Deep - Freedom - Sarcastic.

Other people realated to Wyndham: Margaret Anderson (Editor)