Background
Wyndham was born Percy Wyndham Lewis on November 18, 1882, on shipboard in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, the son of an army captain. His mother, Ann, came from south London, England.
Wyndham was born Percy Wyndham Lewis on November 18, 1882, on shipboard in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, the son of an army captain. His mother, Ann, came from south London, England.
An only child, Lewis was sent to England for the best private school education available at the time. The plan did not work out as intended. Lewis attended Rugby School from 1897 to 1898. Enrolled at the posh Rugby School in Britain's Warwickshire region, Lewis caused trouble from the start. Then Lewis moved on to the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, in London, attending classes from 1898 to 1901 and receiving strong basic training.
Among Percy's first distinctive works was a set of drawings intended for a production of Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens. Lewis founded the Rebel Art Centre and, later, what he called The Great English Vortex.
It lasted for only two issues, but the influence of Vorticism aggressively irregular block typography and daring use of color has continued to resonate for nearly a century.
Lewis enlisted in the British army during World War I, and in 1917 he was sent to the front in France and joined an artillery unit.
In 1917 The Egoist serialized Lewis' short novel Tarr, a satire on bohemianism and German romanticism, set in Paris. The book touched on other strikingly modern topics: homosexuality, the cult of youth, and racial conflict.
He saw fierce fighting in action around Ypres, but unlike other artists he did not seem overly dismayed by it.
After the war he settled in London to paint and write.
Lewis's war paintings anticipated the theme of dehumanization that ran through much of his later work.
Lewis found after the war that his Vorticist style had run its course.
By the end of the decade, Lewis realized the error of his ways and published two anti-Hitler tracts, The Hitler Cult and The Jews: Are They Human? a tract critical of Nazi Germany whose title satirized that of an earlier book, The English: Are They Human? He started new magazines, such as The Tyro and The Enemy, and produced three diatribes against what he held to be excessive romanticism, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), and Paleface (1929).
Lewis further explored some of the ideas from Time and Western Man in his 1928 novel Childermass, intended as part of an allegorical fantasy trilogy to be titled The Human Age. In 1927 Lewis founded another new periodical; this one was called The Enemy, and indeed he made enemies galore with his vituperative attacks on fellow writers, many of whom had been supportive of him in the past.
Low on funds, in 1939 Lewis was stranded in the United States, where he had gone to paint a commissioned portrait. Lewis spent World War II chiefly in Canada and the United States.
He returned to England shortly after the war and lived with his wife in Notting Hill (Rotting Hill, as he called it in a satire dated 1951), where, beset by blindness in the last six years of his life, he wrote several new novels, sometimes using a dictation device in later years.
His reputation was temporarily eclipsed, but British museums mounted several major retrospectives of his artworks in the late 1990th and early 2000th, and even his fiction found new readers.
Mexican Shawl
Mr Wyndham Lewis as 'Tyro'
Seated Figure
Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael
Indian Dance
A Canadian War Factory
A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
La Suerte
Vorticist Composition
Workshop
Edwin Evans
Red Scene
Three Veiled Figures
A Battery Shelled
Planners: Happy Day
The Convalescent
Miss Close
Creation Myth
Froanna, the Artist's Wife
Bagdad
Beach Babies
Newfoundland
Nigel Tangye
Madge Pulsford
Two Mechanics
One of the Stations of the Dead
Creation Myth
Ezra Pound
Panel for the Safe of a Great Millionaire
Masquerade in a Landscape
The Surrender of Barcelona
Mrs Schiff
Composition
Praxitella
Lady Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999), Author
The Crowd
Inca with Birds
Abstract
Pensive Head
Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
Edith Sitwell
In 1931, after a visit to Berlin, Lewis published his book Hitler, which showed Adolf Hitler as a "man of peace" whose party-members were threatened by communist street violence. Following a visit to Germany with his wife in 1937, Lewis changed his views and began to reject his previous political comments. Later he wrote The Hitler Cult, a book which firmly revoked his earlier willingness to entertain Hitler, but politically Lewis remained an isolated figure in the 1930s.
Quotations:
“Contradict yourself, ”
“In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
“I am here (in the firing line) since yesterday.”
“Battery split up, and I have come as reinforcements. Whizzing, banging and swishing and thudding completely surround me, and I almost jog up and down on my camp bed as though I were riding in a country wagon or a dilapidated taxi."
"I am in short, my dear colleague, in the midst of an unusually noisy battle.”
Lewis was a brilliant satirist who attacked what he saw as negative trends in modern society, and he had an obsession with greatness that, perhaps, prevented him from really achieving it.
Quotes from others about the person
“[Lewis was] the only Rugby man until his time who had ever been given the ‘sixth licking’—six full-scale lashings by a prefect in one day.” - William Scammell
“He is now quite widely acknowledged as England's greatest and most original artist of the first half of the twentieth century.” - Flux Europa
Lewis married Gladys Anne Hoskyns in 1930. That marriage produced no children, but Lewis had at least five illegitimate children by other women.