Date: 06-03-2005
Owning Institution: Private Collection
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     20th Century    

The occasion for this week’s choice of picture is an outstanding exhibition of roughly a hundred works by the turbulent and mercurial painter and writer, Percy Wyndham Lewis, which forms one of the highlights of this year’s Fine Art, Design and Antiques Fair at Olympia. The picture in question is one of the most arresting works in the display: a rare early self-portrait by the artist, recently rediscovered and purchased at a small country auction by a private collector and Lewis afficionado, who wishes to remain anonymous. Readers who wish to see it will have to hurry, because today is the last day of the week-long fair.

The self-portrait was almost certainly painted in about 1906-07, when Lewis was living the life of a bohemian, if not quite a down-and-out, in Paris and London. Clearly executed in some haste, it is not entirely finished, quite possibly because Lewis could not afford the necessary painting materials to complete it. He was short of money throughout his early years, and in letters written to his mother at the time his want of cash is a constant theme. Lewis, who was a serial philanderer in his youth, and much prone to brusque misogynistic utterances, had recently taken up with a young German girl called Ida Vendel. He had done so largely, it seems, because she was prepared to model for him for nothing, rather than because of any deep affection that he felt for her (“farewell stinking german bitch” was his less than charming envoi to her, in a letter to a friend, written shortly after their eventual break-up). Perhaps he painted his own self-portrait because, among other things, the subject provided him with another model whom he did not have to pay.

The portrait captures the truculent self-preoccupation of a prototypical angry young man. According to the Concise Dictionary of National Biography, Lewis was “a towering, undisciplined and quarrelsome egotist”, whose “greatest enemy was himself”. T.S. Eliot described him as “the most fascinating personality of our time”, while George Orwell paid him the two-edged compliment of remarking that “Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Lewis’s so-called novels … yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of those books right through.” His most considerable achievement as a writer is by common consent the novel, The Apes of God, while perhaps his most significant contribution to the British art of the twentieth century was to have founded the short-lived Vorticist movement – a lively counterpart of the Cubism of Picasso and Braque and the Futurism of F.T. Marinetti and his Italian acolytes. Vorticism was the closest thing to a modern art movement or an avant-garde in early twentieth-century England. It was born out of Lewis’s violent disgust with the effete respectability (as he saw it) of late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and he expressed its values most assertively in a series of manifestoes published under the collective title BLAST! and printed in thick black capital letters. “BLAST BOURGEOIS VICTORIAN VISTAS”, he proclaimed, characteristically, in one of these missives, while choosing at the same time to “BLESS” all things modern, urban and technological, the epitome of what he saw as “ENGLAND – INDUSTRIAL ISLAND MACHINE.”

Born in 1882, in Nova Scotia, Canada, Percy Wyndham Lewis had emigrated to London with his mother – but not his estranged father – when he was ten years old. He boarded at Rugby School before studying at the Slade School of Art, where he formed a lifelong friendship with his contemporary Augustus John. He studied the works of Signorelli and Michelangelo at the British Museum, but was equally struck by the cornucopia of ethnographic material on display there. “I had always to pass between cases full of more savage symbols on my way to the cinquecento,” he later recalled, and there is perhaps something of the tribal mask about the self-portrait reproduced here. It was painted some seven years before Lewis founded the Vorticist movement, but seems already to portend his desire to break with conventional, academic styles of painting. His interest in supposedly “primitive” means of expression may have deepened yet further in Paris in the early years of the century – where Picasso, among others, had begun to collect and to imitate African and Oceanic works of art.

There also seems something almost incipiently Cubist about the way in which Lewis has painted his face as a series of  interlocking planes – an angry geometry mirrored by his sullen expression. Only the mouth is full and sensual, although here too there is perhaps an implied rapacity. Like Francis Bacon after him, Lewis was fascinated by the human mouth, and included descriptions of it often in his writings. The following somewhat tortuous passage from The Apes of God is characteristic: “In portentous slow-movement of gruelling close-up, his lips forced out to forestall the contact, he approached the rose-bud mouth beneath by the fatal sinking of his head down on hers.

Even when he was in his mid-twenties, Lewis had a highly developed sense of world-weariness and disgust and he always seems to have had an intimation that his lot in life was not to be an entirely happy one. This became yet more pronounced in his later years, when his eyes – so dark and brooding in this self-portrait – were progressively damaged by an inoperable tumour of the brain. Near the end of his life he wrote with a moving blend of energy and apparent nihilism about the loss of his sight and its ultimately ruinous effect on his career as an artist – angry to the last:

“The failure of sight, which is already so far advanced, will of course become worse from week to week, until in the end I will be able to see the external world only through little patches in the midst of blacked-out tissue… Pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked forever, I shall then have to light a lamp of aggressive voltage in my mind to keep at bay the night… As a writer, I merely change from pen to Dictaphone. If you ask, “And as an artist what about that?” I should perhaps answer, “Ah, sir, as to the artist in England! I have often thought it would solce a great many problems if English painters had been born blind.”