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  • Wyndham Lewis Portraits

  • Until Oct 19
    • Critics' Choice
  • National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London, WC2H 0HE
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  • National Portrait Gallery

    'Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro', 1921

  • By Ossian Ward

    Posted: Mon Sep 8

  • An angled eyebrow exaggerates the sneer, while the bared teeth have the cold mechanical look of an automobile grille. The self-portrait of Percy Wyndham Lewis as a ‘Tyro’ is clearly the work of an angry young man – one whose self-published journal he entitled ‘Blast’ and whose self-made art movement was an eddying tornado of abstract, futuristic forms dubbed Vorticism. You can see why he dropped the name Percy. Despite a bilious manifesto, the Vorticists didn’t produce a significant outpouring of work and few early oils by Lewis have survived. So while it might seem a tad effacing to present him as a portraitist, it is at least a strand of work that Lewis pursued throughout his career, before blindness and death took him
    in the ’50s.

    You wouldn’t guess from subsequent portraiture, but Lewis remained an angry man to the end. As a writer of critical journals such as ‘The Enemy’ and satirical novels such as ‘The Apes of God’, he burnt many of his well-connected bridges by ridiculing colleagues, friends and patrons in print. In drawn lines, however, he was even-handed and often flattering to his sitters. The exception here is Virginia Woolf, whose enormous hands and goofy features hint at the hatred he held for the bourgeois Bloomsbury Group, while the many pictures of Edith Sitwell are the only in which the eyes are hooded and downcast, as though she’s lost, either in thought, or within the trappings of her aristocratic world. Lewis also captured awkwardness brilliantly in his 1938 portrait of TS Eliot with ‘a Gioconda smile’, as the artist put it, but it’s the wonderful abstract swirls boiling away behind the serene figure that elevate this beyond physiognomy to a study of creativity. After the heroics of Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Lewis only accords his wife anywhere near as much painterly attention and it’s left to us to piece together how the remainder of his turbulent life – further marred by his short spell as a Nazi sympathiser – mirrored his tragically waning skills as an artist.
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