Wyndham Lewis & the Future of Art

4,465 words

When an unsuspecting member of the public waddles into the Royal Academy of the Arts expecting, perhaps, to find some edifying emblem of beauty and power—only to be confronted by the likes of Damien Hirst licking his lips over a decaying ram carcass in a glass box, Grayson Perry in the quasi-paedophile drag of a 13 year old American schoolgirl, and Marina Abramović sitting abstemiously in the same plastic chair for over nine hours—it is perhaps worth asking with him what has happened to modern art, without resorting to insult his however mediocre cultural intelligence. This at least is how Roger Scruton framed the issue, and I would too if I were speaking a decade ago. But things have changed since then. Things have gotten worse.

Seeing as the attitude of the contemporary person to art generally is simply not to be interested in it or willing to understand anything produced after the late 19th century, it can well be argued that the perspective of outrage at the “Post-Modern” is really old news. This explains why the three “artists” I just mentioned were all at their height during the nineties, broadly coinciding with the Sensation (1997) exhibition by the group collectively known as “Young British Artists”—other members being Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, and Gary Hume; all of whom are now either old, insane, or dead—supposing they weren’t crazy to begin with. I mention this because whatever rot set in during that exhibition has now so consumed the Royal Academy, which was effectively the load star of British art, that nothing is left today within or below it. Nobody cares. Art seems to have died a slow death of a very particular kind of extremism, according to which just painting an object well and enthusiastically is never merely acceptable. In which case, how did this occupational force enter the Royal Academy and art markets in general, and what did that occupation initially aim to suppress?

To boil the answers to these questions down into a less tedious sounding personal anecdote, I once met someone there when the takeover happened. Naturally, this occurred at a tiny disorganised “radical cultural event” during which he was the only man wearing a flowery dressing gown in the place of a suit. His name was Matthew Glamorre. He was a muse of the great painter Lucian Freud, a dear friend of the homosexual performance artist Leigh Bowery, and is today the proud owner of the not particularly interesting London nightclub called HEAVEN. His explanation is my explanation: namely, that modern art started off as something radically exhilarating and complex, but following the Second World War, the American forces that intellectually disassembled the art of National Socialist Germany—busting Arno Breker sculptures here, and bastardizing translations of Nietzsche there—turned inward, and therefore turned against the cultural forces that produced the very masculine strength that enabled Commander Arthur Harris to make the decision to bomb Dresden to begin with. In short, the trend of annihilating the hypermasculine, post-aristocratic early Modernism of Ezra Pound, F.T. Marinetti, and to a much lesser extent the obviously disappointing Pablo Picasso, has continued to the extent that now nothing is left. Supposing that I was some miserable old Tory, Matthew looked at me in a hypnotic, grief-charged way that I will never forget, and that evening told me: “I DESTROYED YOUR WORLD.”

Perhaps he did, seeing as he actively promoted the alternative lifestyles we see everywhere today and won influence in the Pop world of Boy George by exhausting whatever content outside of the initiatic masculinity represented by early Modernism happened to exist. This is Freddy Mercury, this is late Warhol, this is the CIA directly funding Jackson Pollock to create a totally artificial radical American art scene—that wasn’t radical enough to encompass Boyd Rice, Robinson Jeffers or any of the real cultural nightmares you’re not allowed to know about!—in opposition to the potent mid-twentieth century Soviet art scene. To take stock of the modern art market is to realise just how little is left—outside of such secret or suppressed influences. This goes for the creation of paintings and so-called performance art as well as it does for the production of academic studies, the latter of which a particular syntax currently befogs.

As X user wally b kleeposting summarises, “Every lecture at my university is now like ‘Queering the Anthropocene – How Diasporic Bodies are negotiated in the Governmentality of South American E-Dating platforms.” Taking a look at the weekly schedule sent from my own Philosophy department, it was not at all difficult to locate examples of precisely the same grammatical intellectualization of mental blockage: for instance, “Ten Thousand Years of Clouds: On the Multiplicity and Monstrosity of Contemporary Japanese Feminism and Subverting Expectations.”  So constipated is such a mind as writes this that its only, secret wish is to be freed by its opposite. Whatever happened to a pale egotist boarding the stage of a lecture hall like the hull of a pirate ship? You are only permitted to say anything which you don’t believe.

In the art world, which seems like patient zero for such syntactical haemorrhoids, Wyndham Lewis explains the matter in terms of talentless bourgeois intellectuals going out and encouraging stupid but beautifully instinctual artists to overcomplicate themselves. He writes about this in the book The Demon of Progress in the Arts (1950).

Words are more powerful than images; they have the advantage of the civilized man over the primitive man. There is that. And so, naturally, a book can look after itself a great deal better than can an oil-painting, and a writer can look after himself far better than can a painter, because, to start with, he knows a great deal more. If you remember this simple fact, you will understand how it is possible for the writer to come over among the painters and to make of the products of the painter’s art his specialization.

[…] One may simplify this story, and say that a book has come over among a lot of paintings, and eventually climbs on their backs, and perhaps runs away with them. But the functions of the book and of the painting are quite different. For so it is; a painting cannot go over among the books, climb on their backs, mesmerize them and misdirect them, and stampede them in this direction or that. A book, however, can very easily do this with paintings. So a book may be parasitic, it may inflame a thousand paintings and lead them off to the moon, or anywhere it fancies.

Anyone who has experience in the art world is familiar with the presence of the parasitic “Word Men” that Lewis speaks of. These are people that want to turn your somewhat abstract charcoal drawing of figures dancing into an inadvertent celebration of “Black Excellence” during the Haitian Revolution. The theory comes before the image and distorts it afterwards, jamming up the engine of artistic production with whatever pencil or spanner is at hand, so that it’s easier for the man in question to spit up a few blots and call it art than ever paint effectively again. But let us try and be without distortion. What is art, or what was it initially?

Lewis’s answer to this question is doubtlessly influenced by the one provided by a twenty-seven-year- old Friedrich Nietzsche. In his essay The Greek State (1871), the preface to an unwritten book, Nietzsche indicates that, “[W]e must accept [the] cruel sounding truth that slavery is of the essence of Culture; a truth of course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of Existence.” In this, he visualises Art as a giant statue built exclusively due to the slave blood manifesting under the corners of its fists. The cult of leisure only accessible to a few necessarily relies on the exploitation of others in a primordial state, leading to the Communist and Liberal opposition to such strong art he professes is only natural given they regard it as instinctually more life denying than life affirming. According to both Nietzsche and Lewis’s point of view, the figure of the Artist is almost always at odds with whatever establishment tolerates his existence, because everyone secretly knows he is nothing less than the natural dictator—only temporarily appeased with paints, marbles, or sheets of paper when he could just as easily use human materials to form paramilitaries under the right circumstances. The armies under the charge of the writers Mishima, Byron, and Gabriel D’Annunzio salute as illustrations of this point.

Banishing the so-called poets from his ideal society, Plato, again according to Nietzsche, recognised the essential truth, that rather than using paints as his prime material, the essential artist used and bred men in antiquity. And it is these real poets that he celebrates in the place of the false ones, those who cringeworthily write their thoughts to no end. Perhaps in this the ancient clasps the hands of the accelerationist. Plato’s uncle Charmides was a great breeder of peacocks. Nick Land, a sometime classicist, dreams the breeding of angels over the Bionic Horizon in totalising Neo-Darwinian terms. Sculpting an idealised human body might serve as the mathematical standard against which men are held. Therefore, such sculptures tend to scare batty the increasingly obese and mentally ill Left. It is as it was.

But here I have forgotten my main subject. Who is the artist? Who is Wyndham Lewis? Let us bury the body of this prelude and get to praising the meat of the discussion for its tenderness. How can he cure the woes of Modern Art?

This is Praxitella (1921), a portrait of a woman as Dr. Who Dalek, which overwrites and destroys another. On the right of the piece of paper in your hands is the painting Atlantic City (c.1915) by Helen Saunders. On the left you will see Lewis’s painting, which was recently discovered by the Courtauld to be painted over Saunders’ painting, and is perhaps regrettably, or not—much better than it. For where once a discordant but absolute, needful scale of shapes was, there now is a Cyborg Woman who is bizarrely British. See how her head is wanting of a tea cosy. See how her dress is like the side of a ship. This is Lewis’s style: to dig up the forms of ancient industrial things from out of the flesh of modern men and women. And if someone else can be annihilated in the process, well, all the better!

Wyndham Lewis was born on a tiny Canadian barge bound for Europe. In my opinion, his writing more than his painting addressed the issue of what it would mean to rule in the aftermath of a fake “democracy” collapsing, as an artist returned to a user of human paint. What if I spawned chimeras out of genes?  What if, as Lewis wrote about several times, I inscribed the geometry of Euclid in human flesh? What if I imagined it—and then some less imaginative, more technical scientist did it! It was these immanent dreams that were legitimised by the universal collapse of confidence in electoral politics that followed the mass industrial doom of the First World War—for who could have voted for that? From the distended remains of man as voter, Lewis was born—a vituperative human vulture.

Frederic Jameson, a notable Marxist critic, writes in his book Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979) that he, more than any other Modernist leading light—fully akin to T.S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway—was the most suppressed by the art establishment after the Second World War, barring maybe the only partly translated writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The issue of why Lewis was suppressed comes later, although from the title of Jameson’s book you can probably already guess it was due to his flirtations with a certain ideology. Of Lewis’s style, Jameson says:

To face the sentences of Wyndham Lewis is to find oneself confronted with a principle of immense mechanical energy. Flaubert, Ulysses, are composed; the voices of a James or of a Faulkner develop their resources through some patient blind groping exploration of their personal idiosyncrasies from work to work. The style of Lewis, however, equally unmistakable, blasts through the tissues of his novels like a steam whistle, breaking them to his will.

Rather than resorting to prevarication, I will provide a brief episode that summarises why Lewis is basically unlike any other writer in the modern period, matching up with Jameson’s analysis, and in this why he provides a pathway to the new—which would amount to the resurrection of Art through a return of the repressed early Modern energy he represented and maintained longer than others.

This extract comes from Tarr (1917), published alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), as its right-wing shadow—only to be forgotten for posterity. Given that the left have taught me about canon revision, and the revaluation of old, formerly marginalised texts, I am tempted to suggest the opposite will be the case sooner rather than later, and that Tarr rather than being the shadow, will be the book of light. It is, after all, much easier to read than Ulysses and was regarded at the time as of an equal or greater literary merit.

Anyhow, after two hundred and fifty pages of life in a cosmopolitan Paris before World War One, the painter Frederick Tarr falls in love. This is a man who wonders to his boorish Oxford compatriot, Hobson, why woman intellectuals are a thing at the beginning of his book. But let us read it now.

Tarr went slowly up the stairs feeling for his key. He arrived at the door without having found it. The door was ajar: at first this seemed quite natural to him and he continued the search for the key. Then suddenly he dropped the occupation, pushed the door open and entered his studio. The moonlight came heavily through the windows: in part of the room where it did not strike he became aware of an apparition of solid white. It was solid white flowed round by a dark cloud: it crossed into the moonlight and faced, its hands placed like a modest statue’s: the hair reached down the waist, and flowed to the right from the head. This tall nudity began laughing with a harsh sound like stone laughing.

‘Close that door!’ it shouted, ‘there’s a draught. You took a long time to consider my words. I’ve been waiting chilled to the bone my dear[…]Will you engage me as your model sir? Je fais de la réclame pour les Grecs!’

‘You are very ionian—hardly greek. But I don’t require a model thank you, I never use nude models for my pictures.’

‘Well I must dress again, I suppose.’ She turned towards a chair where her clothes were piled. But Tarr shouted ‘I accept, I accept!’ a simultaneous revolt of all his tantalized senses shouted its veto upon further acts of that sort. He seized her from behind and heaving her up from the ground, kissing her in the mass, as it were, carried his mighty, luminous burden through the door at the back of the studio leading to his bedroom.

Rather than man lowering himself to woman or woman simply taking the place of a man, the sex binary is here absolutely upheld so that the couple can meet each other at their strongest: it is man as violent, Nietzschean, laser-eyed gawker; and it is woman as embodied living art God, coming together in the style of that most cooperative of couples Lord and Lady Macbeth.

“You are my efficient chimpanzee then for keeps?”

“No I’m the new animal; we haven’t thought up a name for him yet—the thing that will succeed the Superman.”

Looking for a stylistic equivalent to this kind of world-dominating romance, one shores up dry outside of Shakespeare, and maybe an extremely specific section of Women in Love (1920)—a novel by D.H. Lawrence, one of Lewis’s more notable archnemeses—that portrays the protagonist Rupert Birkin and his paramour Ursula Brangwen transforming into granite skinned ultra-Anglo-Saxons after the latest of their dialogues on Anarcho-Primitivism, before jumping, of course, onto the back of a bicycle.

Since I have sunk this deep into Jameson so far, it will be worth mentioning him one more time on Lewis’s style in general, rather than simply describing how Lewis handles having one in the very distinct domain of his fetishes.

“[N]othing,” says Jameson, “is more characteristic of Lewis’s style than the peculiar rotation of our inferential system around the adjective “strenuous”; than the peculiar slippage of the properties thus named from their official referent in the sentence. The fields, we tell ourselves, can in no case really be thought of as ‘strenuous’: what is strenuous is at best the walk through them…Anthropomorphic projection seems an inadequate term for this shift.”

This is both due to the fact that Lewis perceives the natural world as inherently mechanical, with narratives of machine men and machine ants being perfectly imaginable for him in comparison with the robotic looking insects and all too insectoid men that surrounded him in London and Paris from day to day, and because the really radical Lewis delights in negating everyone else’s philosophy to such an extent that he quickly ends up in a mental space reserved for himself alone. Philosophically—he breaks the game so much—that he ends up “out of bounds”, and “off piece”, beyond the reaches of even the most astute jailbreaker, accomplishing this just by refusing to ever turn back. As alluded to already, this is the Lewis of The Code of the Herdsman (1917), who treats the Artist as a kind of preternatural king of the world, who after thousands of years of distortion by so-called aristocrats, can finally regain his throne above the modern massified Earth by using humans as artistic materials.

My village is being turned into rubble for machines and capital!––moans the humanist traditionalist Catholic, Protestant, Spenglerian, or Marxist.

My village is being turned into rubble for machines and capital!!––screeches Lewis, triumphantly. FAN-TASTIC: more human fodder for the pistons of war. More brilliant biomass for the building of Angels! Death to the nation. I am FOR the individual beyond the human!

This crucial, sinister aspect to Lewis’s work is reflected at its most extreme in his volume of war poetry One Way Song (1933), which centralises what Jameson refers to as “raw sentence production”, or the industrial aspect of written art, and totally subverts the mournful dithyrambs of someone like Wilfred Owen who we’re all familiar with. Bear in mind that out of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, all of whom Lewis knew, hated, and was friends with, Lewis was the only one who fought in the First World War—his job at Passchendaele being to burn or censor love letters that were desperate enough to risk demoralizing the Home Front. Listen to these four lines.

I sabotage the sentence, with me is the naked word.
I spike the verb; all parts of speech are pushed over on their backs.
I am the master of all that is half uttered and imperfectly heard!
Return with me while I am crying out––with the gorilla and the bird!

Geoffrey Hill has already noted in his very substantial lecture on war poetry that ‘all [Lewis’s] energy went into attack’, none into defense; and Jonathan Bowden has commented that the basically acidic attitude on display here extended also to the artist himself, or what was left of him, when he went blind due to the same pituitary tumour that coagulated over the eyes of his hero John Milton almost three hundred years before. As Bowden puts it: “When [Lewis] went blind, he was reviewing fine art for The Listener at that time, and he just had a one-line paragraph saying, ‘I can no longer review because I am blind.—Lewis.’ And that was it!”

We now enter the section of the talk in which I drop any pretence of having an argument and praise what I regard as the greatest work of Modernist prose writing, produced as a result of Lewis’s writing skills flourishing as his sight receded, and which I am almost certain no one else in the room has read. After he had shed his sight and then audience due to writing a not unsympathetic tract called Hitler (1931), where he treated the man as a largely unremarkable German peasant, Lewis turned inward. He decided to write for himself. It’s also worth mentioning that whatever was left of his favour with either Sir Oswald Mosley or his old friends in the British Communist party, it was stamped out due to his subsequent anti-National Socialist and anti-Communist work—which despite being more classically Liberal than any of his other tracts he titled, because he was Lewis, The Jews—Are they Human? (1939)—sallying on to answer that question in the affirmative! Make of that what you will. Yet I mention it because perhaps the most fascinating component of the novel I have taken so long to introduce might be the very strange narrative of complicity it builds between Lewis’s self-insert character, Pullman, and potentially the greatest villain of all Western literature: Sammael, the Devil of the 20th century.

The novel in which Sammael appears is the third volume of Lewis’s Human Age trilogy and its title, if you haven’t heard me praise it in private already, is Malign Fiesta (1955). A word on its setting: this is Modernist Hell. Welcome to the zone where all the recent war dead of the past century and a half—not to exclude the dead of the American Civil War—revive, and drag with them all the ideas of palpable mass death into an afterlife previously innocent of anything but flint-lock pistols and trebuchets. The first book, The Childermass (1928), is set in Modernist Purgatory—an infinite green plain in which a debate is perpetually held between the Bailiff, an avatar for Clement Attlee’s nannying socialism, and Hyperides—an idiotic quasi- Ancient Greek bully boy. Such is the strength of the currents of the early twentieth century that they infiltrate even the metaphysical. See the old painting A Battery Shelled (1919) if you want some idea of what we’re dealing with.

Moving on, the second book in the trilogy is called Monstre Gai (1955)—it’s set in a giant homosexual Limbo called The Third City, over which the uncaring angel nicknamed “Padishah” presides boringly, and towards which the forces of Sammael deliver bombs weekly for their own amusement. Apparently here, you can’t die as a soul, but you can get so mashed up or busted that your broken, insane body can be confined to a small drawer into which your friends can occasionally pour beer and drop sandwiches for the rest of your deformed eternity. Rousing stuff.

Now, Malign Fiesta. After God’s angels decide to raze the Third City to the ground, unhappy with what has become of the utopia, the Bailiff makes a deal with Pullman and his friend Satterthwaite to teleport them to the Other Place and escape. This, it turns out, is not Cambridge—but a kind of celestial Kensington, in which all the polite citizenry are demons with slaves in their basements, fantastic incredibly expensive fire-and-brimstone Ferraris in their garages, and in which the central entertainment is a place designated “Punishment Hospital B”. Over the course of the plot, a fact that quickly creeps to Sammael the Devil’s notice—and results in him becoming close personal friends with Pullman—is his awareness that Pullman, or Lewis, was a great writer on Earth and will therefore be capable of providing recommendations for how best to redesign Hell with his own equivalent of the Department of Government Efficiency. In essence, this is the job that Lewis himself wanted more than anything. And so, Pullman, avatar of Lewis, gets to work designing a breeding programme between the female sinners of Hell and the denizens of Angeltown—hoping, like in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, to ruin the angelic nature by combining it with the disgustingly human. Sammael is amused by all of this.

Yet the standout image—which I will close on—appears when Pullman reaches the bottom of Punishment Hospital B and confronts a bizarre, mixed ideological figure, seemingly crucified above the body of “the representative of the British Imperium”, perhaps Mosley again, who is this time cut down the middle in the style of Mohammed out of Dante’s Inferno. But now it is the bizarre, mixed ideological figure who concerns us.

Reaching from his neck-band to his waist-line was a light slate-blue shirt, in the centre of which was a curious, brightly coloured device. This was in the form of a circle, and within it a number of smaller circles. These represented the principal nations of the world—the Soviet a deep red circle, a yellow one for China, and so on. In the centre was an empty space, and this was almost filled by a dark star. In general appearance this design was based on the Stars and Stripes, but a solitary universal State was there, in place of the forty-eight States of the Union.

…The anatomical machinery picked intact out of the ‘Divine Commedia’, most appropriately selected by Dante, gave the lower part of the figure a macabre appearance.

‘Good morning Doctor,’ the stately scarecrow drawled.

Here is all the pomp of the well-read cosmopolitan artist, all the sarcastic hollowness of the mass party organiser, some of the guilt of the man who set about despising and erecting temporal power instead of praising spiritual authority over the course of an entire life. I have elsewhere compared this figure in Hell to Ezra Pound, but there is a case to be made that this is also Lewis confronting himself. Maybe his interest in Catholicism right at the end of his life in The Red Priest (1956) works as an admission of the fact that whatever Neo-Paganism you think you can embrace when you’re healthy will eventually dry up in the place of the Christianity you need to get through real sickness unto death.

At last: to return briefly to the waddling surprised appreciator of art going through the Royal Academy, I conclude by saying that if the heroic, self-contradictory standard of Wyndham Lewis was embraced fearlessly by more artists of today, we would see before us not a less astonished average spectator, but a more outraged and spellbound critical elite. It is through the blast wounds that a disciple of Lewis—like the sculptor Fen de Villiers—leaves in the side of such people that we can be sure vision seeps through the cracks of.

So, blast away.

Fen de Villiers’ “Breakthrough” exhibition (2021)