Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1882 Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada

Died: 1957 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1893

Other name/s: Percy Wyndham Lewis

Biography

Painter, writer, and art critic, Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on a yacht to a wealthy family on 18 November 1882 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. His mother, Anne Stuart Lewis (née Prickett), was born in the UK of Irish and Scottish heritage, and his father, Charles Edward Lewis, was American. In 1893, when their marriage ended in divorce, Anne returned to England, taking young Lewis with her, now living a financially precarious life. At 16, Lewis’s artistic talents earned him a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, where he studied for three years. However, he left for Paris before graduating and then travelled extensively across Europe. From 1918 to 1921, Lewis shared his life with film critic and curator, Iris Barry. They never married but had two children together. In 1930, Lewis married Gladys Anne Hoskins, a woman 18 years his junior.

In 1908, Lewis returned to London. He wrote satirical texts and began painting in a manner that mixed Cubist and Expressionist forms. In 1913, Lewis was a co-founder of The London Group, an exhibiting plalform for contemporary artists, along with Walter Sickert, Spencer Gore and Jacob Epstein, an amalgamation of the Camden Town Group and the English Cubists (later the Vorticists) in 1913. A falling out with fellow artist and critic Roger Fry, with whom he worked at the Omega Workshop, further motivated Lewis to establish the competing Rebel Art Centre, eventually leading to the inception of his own artistic movement. Characterised by abstract geometric shapes, bold lines, and sharp angles, inspired by machinery and urban landscapes, Lewis’s avant-garde art movement, Vorticism, was officially established in 1914. The movement sought to encapsulate the vigorous energy of modern society. The artists viewed themselves as a stationary point amidst a spinning vortex of modern life. Their manifesto, published in Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, was a clarion call against the perceived staidness of the Victorians and a celebration of the modern age. Though the magazine boasted contributions from avant-garde figures such as the American-born poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor, Jacob Epstein, and the French-born sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, it was short-lived, spanning only two issues. While Vorticism critiqued the Italian avant-garde movement, Futurism, it nevertheless shared its intense energy, political stances, and anti-establishment rhetoric. The First World War disrupted the growth of Vorticism, with Lewis himself serving on the front line as an artillery officer. Later, he received a commission as an official war artist and depicted scenes from the battlefield. The role of women within Vorticism was complex and rife with contradictions, with only two female artists, Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr, associated with the movement. In 2022, the Courtauld Gallery exhibited Lewis’s 1921 portrait of Barry, entitled Praxitella, with conservation work revealing that he had, almost certainly deliberately, painted over Saunders’s large-scale abstract painting Atlantic City underneath.

Lewis was also a prolific writer. His novel Tarr (1918) narrated the lives of two Bohemian artists in pre-war France. However, a disturbing antisemitism permeated his writing (Ayers, 1992, pp 134-56), including his 1931 book Hitler, written after returning from Berlin and espousing a defence of Hitler’s politics. However, in 1932, Lewis faced two libel cases, making publishers cautious of working with him. His support for fascism cost him friendships and tarnished his reputation, despite his later admission of poor political judgment. A subsequent visit to Nazi Germany in 1937 precipitated a radical change in his perspective. In 1939, Lewis published The Jews, Are They Human?, a book which attacked Hitler and which was positively reviewed by the Jewish Chronicle, the mouthpiece of Anglo-Jewry. That same year, Lewis and his wife moved to the USA for a lecture tour and commissions, hoping to revive his finances. However, the onset of the Second World War stranded them in North America. After an unproductive time in New York, they endured three impoverished years in a rundown Toronto hotel before moving to Windsor, Ontario, Canada where Lewis became a lecturer at Assumption College. After the end of the war in 1945, the couple returned to London, where Lewis assumed the role of art critic for The Listener magazine, a publication affiliated with the BBC.

There were few exhibitions showcasing Lewis and the Vorticists during his lifetime. Beyond two significant Vorticist exhibitions in London (1915) and New York (1917), a first solo exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery (1919) and a retrospective at Tate Gallery (1956), public displays were rare. Wyndham Lewis died in Westminster Hospital, London, England on 7 March 1957. However, the 21st century has witnessed a revived interest in Lewis and Vorticism. In 2013 Ben Uri featured his portrait of Edith Sitwell in its centenary exhibition Uproar: The First 50 Years of the London Group 1913-1963. His work is held in several UK public collections, including the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; British Council Collection; Courtauld Gallery, London; Imperial War Museum, London; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Portrait Gallery, London; and Tate.

Related books

Nathan O'Donnell, Wyndham Lewis's Cultural Criticism: And the Infrastructures of Patronage (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023)
Richard Slocombe, Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War (London: Imperial War Museums, 2017)
Paul Ivar Hjartarson, Gregory Betts and Kristine Smitka, eds., Counter-blasting Canada : Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016)
Tyrus Miller, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
'Uproar!': The first 50 Years of The London Group 1913‒63, exh. cat., Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (London: Ben Uri in association with Lund Humphries, 2013)
Lara Trubowitz, Civil Antisemitism, Modernism, and British Culture, 1902-1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Leon Surette, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011)
David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
Wyndham Lewis, The Jews, Are They Human? (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939)
Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931)
Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (London: The Egoist, 1918)

Public collections

Related organisations

Slade School of Art (student)
The London Group (founder)
Vorticist Group (founder)

Selected exhibitions

A Modern Masterpiece Uncovered: Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and Praxitella (dual exhibition), The Courtauld Gallery, London (2022–23)
Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War (solo exhibition), Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (2018)
'Uproar!': The first 50 Years of The London Group 1913‒63, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2013)
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (group show), MoMA, New York (2012–13)
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World (group show), Tate Britain, London (2011)
The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2011)
Vorticism and its Allies (group show), Hayward Gallery, London (1974)
Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism (group show), Tate Britain, London (1956)
Group X (group show), Mansard Gallery, London (1920)
Wyndham Lewis (solo exhibition), Goupil Gallery, London (1919)
Vorticist Exhibition (group show), the Penguin Club, New York (1917)
Vorticist Exhibition (group show), Doré Galleries, London (1915)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Wyndham Lewis]