Once more with feeling

Edith Sitwell, 1923-35

5 April 2012

Wyndham Lewis has some claim to be the only intellectual painter in the whole history of British art, though I dare say that some working now - Craig-Martin, for example - might argue their right to that small crown.

Most of us know little about him for he has not been much exhibited: the Tate's last retrospective was in 1956, a year before his death, and the Imperial War Museum dealt with him as a war artist in 1992.

A very few London dealers have held his drawings and watercolours in stock over the past 30 years or so, steadily building interest in him, but one of these rocked the market in the early Eighties when duped by an ingenious forger; one now has to be very wary of any example without a proveable provenance.

With such invisibility it is not surprising that, if we know of him at all, it is as the man on the fringe of Bloomsbury who had a flaming row with Roger Fry. And hurrah I say for that - the row, not the invisibility, for he was the only man in the English-speaking world who saw through that old fraud and was prepared to say so.

Much good it did him. For most of his life he was a lone prophet in the wilderness, not merely ignored but deliberately excluded by the art establishment - he became, as he said of David Bomberg in 1949, "one of the lost generation that really got lost".

He was, however, his own worst enemy; as much a writer and a novelist as a painter, even a political commentator unwise enough to express sympathy for Hitler's early struggles, he broke a British rule, and the British, who do not care for men with more than one ability, solved their pigeon-holing problem by ignoring him.

As one wise authority put it a quarter of a century ago at the first rustlings of revived interest: "Had it not been for the intervention of the war, the dissipation of his energies in controversy and propaganda, and had he not proved as great in literature as in art, he would have been one of the supreme and most influential artistic personalities of the century."

That is one hell of a claim. If the war to which it refers is the First World War, then it is obviously wrong, for Lewis was inspired by his presence in it, first as a gunner and then as a war artist, to produce what some historians think his best work; if it is the Second, then it is less obviously wrong, but some of us are inclined to think that his always unsteady abilities had begun to wane at much the same time as he reached his peak in portraiture as the Thirties turned into the Forties.

That is not quite the contradiction that it may seem: his great portraits, of which T S Eliot and Ezra Pound are fine examples, are civilised observations in which the mannerisms of his style take second place to his responsibilities as a portrait painter for the future (Eliot wrote of his that it was "one by which I am quite willing that posterity should know me"), but in lesser works the logic falls away and only style remains.

One may indeed argue that Lewis was always a man of style and often of very little more - a style so unmistakable that it has been easy to produce unsubtle forgeries. He tormented his subjects, twisted and turned them, stretched and distorted them, denied their nature, employed the exaggerations of the cinema and in all this painted commanding pictures that are monuments of deliberate style far more than they are clear illustrations of polemics and ideas.

His pictures and drawings tell a frightening truth, not about their subjects but about the overweening confidence of Lewis as, willy-nilly, he applied the Wyndham Lewis style to subjects of such tragedy and menace as should make a strong man weep. But weep he does not, for with the passage of years, the paintings of Wyndham Lewis have become no more disturbing than the early cartoons of Walt Disney or the black-and-white classics of German cinema.

In Lewis I sense intellectual arrogance rather than integrity, even dishonesty of a kind, an inability to respond other than as a Pavlov dog responded - a painter who never evoked empathy, who could paint the horrors of war utterly detached from the human predicament of the trenches, who could draw a sensual woman and reduce her sensuality to that of a segmented orange, all in the interest of style.

Lewis is, for the moment, in the air; an exhibition of drawings at the Courtauld Institute has just concluded, and a more encyclopaedic exhibition of paintings and drawings opens today at the Fine Art Fair, Olympia, and lasts, regrettably, only until the end of this week.

It ranges, admittedly unevenly, from a very early drawing possibly executed when he was a student at the Slade (from which he was expelled, just as he had been from Rugby), to a watercolour of the late Forties, when his sight was failing and he could barely see more than a few inches beyond his nose.

Visitors will make many connections with other painters, both British and European. Lewis was by far the most widely travelled and experienced painter of his generation of British artists, trained not only at the Slade, but at schools of equal stature in Paris and Munich, living in Europe for the years 1902-1908.

He frequently betrayed a powerful interest in intellectual and revolutionary art movements, of which there was not one in England until he formed his own one-man band in 1914 and declared war on Bloomsbury, seeking to suck it and its luvvies into a vortex and destroy them.

He was to some extent a Cubist, though he repudiated them as frauds; he embraced the Futurism of the Italians, but treated with derision their passion for speed and flight and noisy motor cars; he admired the "high metaphysical region" of Giorgio de Chirico and borrowed not only his ideas but those of his weak and silly brother, Alberto Savinio. He was evidently aware of the various factions of German Expressionism and was to reflect the cruel caricatural work of German artists in the early Twenties.

In abstraction the parallels between his work and that of the Russian Constructivists are uncanny but can perhaps be attributed to zeitgeist; his closest kinships are with Epstein's Rock Drill sculptures and Bomberg's abstract paintings - spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic kinships of extraordinary strength.

At the other extreme he had an eye for the past and admired both Uccello's armoured Rout in the National Gallery and the aggressively masculine figures by Signorelli in Orvieto Cathedral.

Some visitors will share my difficulties with Lewis, will find his emotional detachment chilling, his exaggerated menace ludicrous, his stylistic distortions empty and repetitive, his Blasting and his Vorticism unconvincing - we may even be grateful that he wasted himself on novels that now seem unreadable and political comments that were quite certainly naive and, as a consequence, painted much less than he might.

And yet there is a grudging sense that he was possibly, just possibly, the one painter of the first half of the 20th century who could have brought Britain into the turbulent sweep of European culture then, had it not been for the power of his two worst enemies, Roger Fry and himself.

The Fine Art, Design and Antiques Fair opens at Olympia, W14, today, 5pm-10pm; then from 11am daily until Sunday. Entrance is £10 but readers who present this page will receive one free ticket from the box office (Hammersmith Road entrance). Further information: 0870 1219994.

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