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The demon of progress in the arts
A book of cultural criticism, one of the last works from the controversial writer and artist.
- GenresArtPhilosophyNonfiction
97 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1954
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About the author
Wyndham Lewis
118 books161 followers(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).
After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.
The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.
After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.
The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 7, 2021
Lewis had gone blind three years prior to writing this short book on the visual arts. Unless told, you would never know. The painter's mind, the writer's mind outlived his eyes.
Yet, this biographical detail is not the most remarkable feature of his book. Written almost 70 years ago, its pages are marked with a profound cultural analysis that could have been penned yesterday. The "pursuit of zero" (as Lewis calls it) is just as, if not more, alive today.
A physical copy may be hard to find. It is freely available at archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet....
Yet, this biographical detail is not the most remarkable feature of his book. Written almost 70 years ago, its pages are marked with a profound cultural analysis that could have been penned yesterday. The "pursuit of zero" (as Lewis calls it) is just as, if not more, alive today.
A physical copy may be hard to find. It is freely available at archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet....
January 24, 2025
Another classic by the greatest writer in the world.
"All those who paint regard the painter of genius with awe, as a man who has, in the highest degree, the mastery of the secret. They rejoice, with exultation, at the farcical stories, such as those of Monsieur Vollard, about their hero, showing what a dumb, stupid, if you like, creature he was. For he was not as other men; he was a heaven-sent idiot, the essential painter, and nothing else. He was not a man, he was a painter.
In every high craft a consciousness of isolation, similar to this, exists. More than in any other, I suppose, there is in higher mathematics a sense of apartness conjoined with superiority. The mathematician is a man who, in his highest flights of imagination, is familiar with realities so augustly remote from the daily round of human life, and is the master of a craft as inaccessible as painting or sculpture, that he must regard himself, to some extent, as privileged among men as is the artist. Also, all those occupied in the most abstruse mathematical fields are bound to experience a sensation of electness, and can hardly escape twinges of superiority—and with much more justification than any but the greatest artist.
But there is no craft so humble but the craftsman derives a certain satisfaction in knowing that there is no man alive (not of his craft) who can do what he can do, whether it be a piece of fine cabinet-making, or the growing in a hot-house of a rare plant."
"All those who paint regard the painter of genius with awe, as a man who has, in the highest degree, the mastery of the secret. They rejoice, with exultation, at the farcical stories, such as those of Monsieur Vollard, about their hero, showing what a dumb, stupid, if you like, creature he was. For he was not as other men; he was a heaven-sent idiot, the essential painter, and nothing else. He was not a man, he was a painter.
In every high craft a consciousness of isolation, similar to this, exists. More than in any other, I suppose, there is in higher mathematics a sense of apartness conjoined with superiority. The mathematician is a man who, in his highest flights of imagination, is familiar with realities so augustly remote from the daily round of human life, and is the master of a craft as inaccessible as painting or sculpture, that he must regard himself, to some extent, as privileged among men as is the artist. Also, all those occupied in the most abstruse mathematical fields are bound to experience a sensation of electness, and can hardly escape twinges of superiority—and with much more justification than any but the greatest artist.
But there is no craft so humble but the craftsman derives a certain satisfaction in knowing that there is no man alive (not of his craft) who can do what he can do, whether it be a piece of fine cabinet-making, or the growing in a hot-house of a rare plant."
September 26, 2023
A prescient and insightful look at artists from the 50s. Focus on 'extremism' in art and politics. Quite funny in places, but oh how things haven't changed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews