Wyndham LewisWhere the Cubists and Futurists in the first decades of this century took the seen and broke the forms down into their geometric equivalents, Wyndham Lewis went on from there and bent and twisted those geometric reductions till they began to resemble and became infused with the rounded shapes of motors and the molten power of machine parts of the emerging industrial age. Figures are promoted to geometric composition acquiring the vitality and new forms that the dawning of the machine age prophesized. At this time of glory, before they were adapted for destructive use in World War I, the creative power of machines was unlimited and Lewis, attempting to break away from the staid romanticism that existed in his England, pulled this industrial current into his work. Vehemently opposed to most current and past movements, and with praise only for Cezanne, Lewis's watercolors, pencil, ink and gouache, oils and collages shown in this show (which covers 1911–29) celebrate the freedom of breaking away from the strict representation of the perceived into a new fusion of the real with the joyful inventiveness of the artificial. A composition such as "Dancing Figures" of 1914 shows three figures whose bodies are composed of cylindrical and rectangular forms, highlighted and given detail with the use of gouache and ink shading. These figures are practically merged into the pure geometrical arrangement of lines, jagged angles and flat angular planes that make up the "background," though figure and background are all seen flush against the flat picture plane. Color isn't used merely to decorate but to accent the composition. Other works depict figures who are much more dimensional and shapely, built up out of spheres, triangles, cylinders and rectangles of varying sizes. These don't show the body reduced to its simpest components but infuse the body with an embellishing arrangement of its own geometric components. In some works, the painted figures display the angles and basic essential shapes we know must be what the final energized reduction of the human body would come down to. They show the body in flux, attaining a new charged permutation of form and synthesis that expresses the zeal of the factories. A series of three pure abstractions done in 1926 reveals that he didn't need to use the visible as a springboard. Here the "Abstract Design" is made of the same basic geometric units given the appearance of depth with ink shading. All the contours are precise and clearly defined. The design attains its coherence from this. Lewis was the "manifesto painter" that Fairfield Porter accused him of being (in a letter to the "Kenyon Review," 1941). He certainly didn't have the range of Picasso, whom he attacked for his retention of the seen. But his contribution in his own narrow pocket must be seen as a vital development in the art of this century. He rejected the sentimental and romantic uses of the image as we'd always seen it or wished to see it and steered art on a revolutionary new course to where it attained a new function of prophecy and the expression of pure ideas that celebrated creative intelligence not talent at interpreting a view. His work forecasted a future that, 70 years later, we can still aspire to. (Arts, December 1985) |