LEWIS, (PERCY) WYNDHAM

born Nov. 18, 1882, on a yacht near Amherst, Nova Scotia, Can. died March 7, 1957, London English artist and writer who founded the abstract Vorticist movement, which, in painting and literature before World War I, sought to relate art to the industrial process. About 1893 Lewis moved to London with his mother when his father separated from her. At the age of 16 he won a scholarship to London's Slade School of Art, but, leaving three years later without completing his course, he went to Paris, where he practiced painting and attended lectures at the Sorbonne. On his return to London in 1909 he began to write stories and to exhibit his paintings. In 1914 the first of two numbers of Blast, a Vorticist review, appeared. Lewis' writings in this journal show the influence of Imagist poetry, while the designs by Lewis and others, in their violent and theatrical handling of harsh shapes, have much in common with Futurism (q.v.), a movement that sought to glorify speed and the machine. In World War I Lewis served at the front as an artillery officer and then, commissioned as a war artist, produced some memorable paintings and drawings of battle scenes. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918; he then worked in seclusion until 1926, when a remarkable series of books began to appear: The Art of Being Ruled (political theory); Time and Western Man (an attack on subjectivity and the cult of flux in modern art); The Lion and the Fox (a study of Shakespeare and Machiavelli); and The Wild Body (short stories and essays on satire). In 1930 he caused a furor in literary London with his huge satirical novel, The Apes of God, in which he scourged wealthy dilettantes. The 1930s brought great accomplishments but few rewards. Though Lewis produced some of his most noted paintings, including The Surrender of Barcelona (1936) and a portrait of the poet T.S. Eliot (1938), and wrote some of his finest books, including Men Without Art (literary criticism; 1934), Blasting and Bombardiering (memoirs; 1937), and The Revenge for Love (a novel; 1937), he was deeply in debt by the end of the decade. Two successful libel actions brought against him in 1932 had made publishers wary of Lewis, while books and articles championing Fascism had lost him many friends. Though Lewis later admitted his errors of political judgment, his reputation never recovered. In 1939 Lewis and his wife journeyed to the United States, where he hoped to recoup his finances with a lecture tour and portrait commissions. The outbreak of World War II made return impossible; after a brief, unsuccessful stay in New York City, they went to Canada, where they lived in poverty for three years in a dilapidated Toronto hotel. His 1954 novel, Self-Condemned, is a fictionalized account of those years. At the war's end, Lewis and his wife returned home; he became art critic for The Listener, a publication of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Until his sight failed in 1951, he produced a memorable series of articles for that journal, praising several young British artists, such as Michael Ayrton and Francis Bacon, who later became famous. He also wrote a second volume of memoirs (Rude Assignment, 1950), satirical short stories (Rotting Hill, 1951), and the continuation of a multivolume allegorical fantasy begun in 1928 (The Human Age, 195556). A year before his death he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery.