The Apes of God

by Len Gutkin If Wyndham Lewis, like food cured in lye, is an acquired taste, then The Apes of God (1930), a massive satiric roman-a-clef of unrivaled toxicity, is a glass of straight lye taken neat. “No one’s favorite book,”[1] this longest of Lewis’s works of fiction—623 tightly printed pages in the beautiful Black Sparrow… Continue Reading The Apes of God

The Childermass

by Len Gutkin Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass (1928), the first volume of the unfinished epic The Human Age (parts two and three came out in the fifties), is unarguably the most radical, outlandish, and formally experimental work in Lewis’s oeuvre. Aptly dubbed by Frederic Jameson as “the supreme realization of what has to be called… Continue Reading The Childermass

Tarr

by Len Gutkin Tarr (1918), Wyndham Lewis’s first published novel, demonstrates a significant expansion and refinement of the techniques and themes Lewis had been developing in short stories published in The Little Review and in the short play The Enemy of the Stars (in Blast, 1914). Though the novel’s titular character functions partly as a… Continue Reading Tarr

Kermesse

Wyndham Lewis’s painting Kermesse (1912) exemplifies the patterns of lines, arcs, and other geometric shapes of Vorticist art, which sometimes seem purely non-representational but often suggest the rapid movement of bodies or machines. The painting, named after a Flemish peasant dance, represents a radically mechanized alternative to Matisse’s graceful, flowing paintings of dancers. The huge… Continue Reading Kermesse

Time and Western Man

by Kirsty Dootson Between the wars, Wyndham Lewis entered into the most prolific period of his career, writing twenty-three fictional and non-fictional books concerning politics, religion, philosophy and the arts. His non-fiction texts of the nineteen-twenties were originally planned as a single enormous work entitled The Man of the World but Lewis decided (or was encouraged… Continue Reading Time and Western Man

Exhibition of the Camden Town Group and Others

This exhibition was held from December 1913 to January 1914 at the Brighton City Art Gallery. Although it was advertised as ‘An exhibition of the Camden Town Group and Others’ – the catalogue sported the title ‘An exhibition of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others’ and the introduction by J. B. Manson called it an exhibition… Continue Reading Exhibition of the Camden Town Group and Others

BLAST

by Pericles Lewis Ezra Pound collaborated with Wyndham Lewis on the first issue of the journal BLAST, published less than a month before the outbreak of the first world war (July 1914). The volume contained a manifesto, a few of Pound’s less successful poems, reproductions of Vorticist paintings, the first draft of Ford Madox Ford’s… Continue Reading BLAST