Wyndham Lewis
1882 - 1957
Lives in London (United Kingdom).
Wyndham Lewis was a British Modernist artist and writer. He is best known for the magazine Blast, the art movement Vorticism, and for his satirical fiction. In 1908 Lewis began to publish satirical short stories that took a mechanistic view of human social behavior, evident in the deliberately clumsy and grotesque figures in his art of the period 1909 to 1912. By 1912 he had developed his own linear vocabulary of forms, indebted to Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist forms, which gives an often ironic visual dimension to the themes of his fiction. Throughout the 1920s, Lewis, posing as the ‘enemy', produced a bewildering quantity and range of work. During the 1930s Lewis ran into widespread opposition to his political views, which, although far more intricate and liberal than is usually allowed, have to be described as authoritarian. His reactionary views, especially his anti-Semitism, have more or less consigned him to oblivion today. Lewis served in France in World War I, and his dynamic paintings of war scenes soon gained him wide recognition for his art, now represented in the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lewis sailed to North America in 1939, eking out a living by painting, writing and lecturing. Lewis returned to London in 1945. A malignant tumour was crushing his optic nerve, and he eventually went blind in 1951, having painted little since the war.
