Blasts from the Vortex

...In his own day Lewis was a rather angry star floating in the heaven of the "modern movement," distinctly apart from and on a lower level than Eliot, Pound and Joyce, who were, intermittently and not always peacefully, his friends...

...Nonetheless, I am surprised that in correctly tracing Lewis' first use of the word "Vorticism" to 1914, Michel did not pick up the clue to the origin of the term: It is contained in Boccioni's Futurist Manifesto of 1910, which declares that art must "express the vortex of modern life—a life of steel, fever, pride, and headlong speed...

...Lewis' enmities were sufficiently resented for the Bloomsbury luminaries who governed the London world of the arts between the wars to make it difficult for him to live by his painting and writing, or to gain the audience he felt he deserved...

...Given a good library, it is possible to become familiar with all except the most obscure of Lewis' writings, but Michel's volume provides the first opportunity to judge with any degree of completeness his achievement as a visual artist...

...Similarly, the subjects of his portraits, people in this actual and living world, seem absorbed by the very quality of the drawing into another realm with its own reality—they appear to be consorting with the robots and totems of Lewis' paintings in the period between his abstracts and portraits...

...Here is a further complexity: If in some sense Lewis' figures, even the people in his portraits, are hollow as human beings, may they not, as creations of art, be complete...

...The first time I saw "The Armada," I was amazed to discover that this work—which in reproduction gives the impression of a very large canvas—is in fact a small painting, only three feet by two feet...

...That is as near to the border between estheticism and mysticism as any artist is ever likely to get...

...in the 1930s he was willing to sell many of his drawings for a pound each, and even then he often found no buyers...

...The book has its limitations, some avoidable, others not...

...It was largely circumstance—poverty and lack of working space?that made Lewis take to drawing and painting on tiny sheets of paper or miniature canvases...

...Michel's commentary is generally sensible, and his scholarship is sound...

...In retrospect, however, all the furies of Lewis' life, all his "Blasting and Bombardiering," take on a curiously formal quality, like the stilled dances of images abstracted from life that appear on his canvases...

...His output was undoubtedly much greater, for many works passed out of sight in those hectic times when he was so poor that he could afford neither a studio nor an easel and had to rest his canvas—usually a very tiny one —on a chair in his bedroom...

...still, the ultimate effect is never that of a diminished vision...

...Although the exhibition fh«t will satisfy the small but fervent group of Lewis' admirers is still in the future, after many years of patient work Walter Michel has produced the next best thing in Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings...

...In the end he retained from Vorticism only the sense of art as a timeless and static world, an eternity of artifice focused on central stillness...

...A good Lewis watercolor can still be purchased for less than $500, though that is far more than Lewis himself usually received...

...Yet in the abstractions some curve, some concatenation of lines, always suggests an image drawn from life...

...There are tiny reproductions in the book that suggest massive works, so grand is the conception, but the originals are no more than five inches by three inches...

...There is no doubt that Lewis was far more deeply influenced by Futurism before World War I than Michel cares to admit, though he quickly shed the mannerisms of the Futurists themselves...

...after the initial moment of amazement, the size did nothing to reduce the work's static grandeur...

...This has made it difficult in recent years, despite Lewis' slowly yet steadily rising reputation, to assemble an effective retrospective show or to compile a full catalogue of his oeuvre...

...Writing about Lewis, it is always tempting to call up from the past the image of the artist as The Enemy that he so assiduously cultivated, and to invoke Victor Considerant's famous description of Proudhon (with whom Lewis had so much in common temperamentally): "that strange man who has determined that none should share his views...

...The particular method of satire he chose in literature was closely related to the formal approach he adopted in the visual arts...

...With an introduction by Hugh Kenner and a long analytical study of Lewis as painter by Michel himself, this collection will undoubtedly contribute to the reestablishment of Lewis' position as a visual artist in the same way that paperback reprints of his novels and literary polemics are slowly stabilizing his reputation as a writer...

...His works are not among those for which collectors and galleries compete to pay extravagant prices...

...Though his vision was different from that of the Cubists, Lewis also saw art as breaking down what one perceives in life and reconstructing it into a static and crystalline form...

...The small size of so many of the reproductions —a few are only two inches square —is less of a disadvantage than might be expected, for Lewis had an extraordinary ability to create the feeling of grandeur in a limited soale...

...author, "Canada and the Canadians" WYNDHAM LEWIS has never been a popular artist...

...The volume contains 800 illustrations showing all the Lewis works of which Michel has been able to obtain photographs and a catalogue raisonne listing the more than 1200 pictures Lewis is known to have completed...

...While Lewis was quite sincerely angered by literary pretenses, his attacks against the pretenders in his polemical essays and in such novels as The Revenge for Love and the anti-Sitwellian Apes of God did not really go outside his artistic field...

...As a result, his pictures have filtered through a kind of subterranean movement to countless little galleries and private collections all over the world...

...It is unfortunate that only 16 of the illustrations are in color, though the loss is less in the case of Lewis than in that of many other painters, since the strength of line and tone in his painting emerges even in black and white...

...The essence of Vorticism—the movement Lewis founded and essentially was—lay in his concept of the still, unmoving center, of art living "soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses...

...the masklike figures representing the hollow-ness of intellectual pretensions in his fiction closely resemble the ambiguous beings of his paintings...

...Lewis commanded a great range of styles, from the almost pure abstractionism of his early work to the accomplished representationalism that made him probably the last of the great portrait painters...