On the 1939 T.S. Eliot portrait
“Like the best Lewis portraits, it is somewhere between icon and caricature. And it raises questions that go deeper than truth or flattery, cruelty or sympathy. It asks what it is to be a self. It holds a lesson for our own, desperately identity-seeking age.“Consider a caricature. It may be insulting, but it can also be empowering. Caricatures are often relished by their ‘victims’, not only because to be caricatured is a measure of fame, but because it gives them a firm identity. It makes them a distinct individual, even if that individual is a grotesque.

“The profundity of Lewis’s portraiture is that it sees both sides of the question – the power and the bondage of an identity […] Lewis…giv[es] Eliot, in this image, an inescapable identity.”
Read the full review here

“The portraits in this show provide a rare opportunity to revise old prejudices and make restitution to the shades of the man Walter Sickert called "the greatest portraitist of this or any other time". Works, known only in reproduction, come alive and sing. Lewis is revealed as a considerable colourist, not a gravy blender restricted to greys, browns and murky corduroys. The background of Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael (1921) is not the flat expanse of dim orange that it once appeared but a hot pink overpainting of the rejected Vorticist experiments beneath. Iris Barry, in L'Ingénue (1919), is warmer and more delicate in shape and shading than the catalogue version. We realise, as we move closer, that a secondary exhibition can be discovered in the fragmentary works the artist employs to activate his compositional space: a final self-curated show hidden away like a library of the lost. Fifty years dead, long out of fashion, the blind man can still teach us how to see.”
Read the full review here

“Lewis was more than a caricaturist, less than ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’, as Sickert claimed Lewis was. His crucial contribution was to bring a modernist agenda to British portraiture at a time when most artists of originality disdained the genre altogether. In the 1940s, he began to lose his sight and in 1951 he resigned as The Listener’s art critic because he could no longer see a picture.

Anticipating total blindness, he wrote a valedictory article imagining that ‘pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked forever, I shall then have to light a lamp of aggressive voltage in my mind to keep at bay the night’. But that sharp inner light is already here, in the haughty, compressed, whiplash depictions of modernism’s heroes which continue to define our image of an epoch, as well as illuminating Lewis’s singular vision.
Read the full review here

“And that is the striking paradox of this show. The paintings are graphic, mechanistic, edging towards illustration, whereas the drawings are rich with grace, emotion and insight. Surely nobody has ever made a better portrait of Joyce, his myopic eyes like twin locks to which there is no available key; or Rebecca West, the two sides of her face – beautiful and painfully intelligent – epitomising the perfect mismatch (and misfortune) of her life.

“Above all, the drawing of Sitwell marks the difference between the informal, intimate Lewis and the public artist so bent on affront. It is a poignant image, Sitwell leaning forward with one hand to her heart, a frail creature encased in a cumbersome jumper, clearly in deep rapport with the artist.”
Read the full review here

“A new sense of vision emerges [in later years] and, notably for a man who could be misogynistic, most tenderly with women. His 1932 drawing of Rebecca West combines style and substance to wonderful effect. His images of his wife are remarkable.

“Who knows what he might have gone on to achieve if he had not gone blind? He said of his final oil painting, a second picture of Eliot, that he wanted to paint a portrait of a man “haunted by vision”. Perhaps, as his sight faded, he was thinking of his own lost possibilities. He said that it was his work as a portraitist that was his “grand visual legacy”. We can only regret that he did not do more.”
Read the full review here

‘Wyndham Lewis’ by Andrew Causey in Burlington Magazine.

Underpowered and not particularly interesting. A missed opportunity, given the status of the Burlington. Causey does have some interesting remarks on masks:

Sitters’ faces in Lewis’s portraits are like masks in the way individual expression or the registering of particular moments in time are eliminated. The paradox is that these masks do resemble the sitters. Why mask the face if you want to represent it? It was Lewis’s way of acknowledging his sitters’ individuality while keeping his distance and recording the typical rather than the passing features. (625)
Causey suggests that Portrait of the artist as the painter Raphael of 1921 may have been so titled because Raphael’s fourth centenary (death) occurred in 1920, and with the rappel à l’ordre then current, “was rousing great interest”. Causey also notes that Praxitella (1920-21),though illustrated in the catalogue, did not appear in the show. It would not have taken much research to establish that it was too fragile to travel from Leeds.

Read review here. [721 Kb ]
Reference: Burlington Magazine CL, 1266 (September 2008), 625-6.   

Gossipy, superficial, unfocused…what does Sewell really think about Lewis? It’s difficult to tell from this review (if you can get through it). It’s easier to tell from some remarks in a glossy called Time & Leisure: “One of the best 20th century artists but a poor exhibition badly hung”. He goes on to explain that the drawings – “which needed to be in a dim light for preservation” – should have been separated from the paintings, which required “full light for proper exposure”.

This commentary on the exhibition (rather than the artist) may explain the widely-held view that Sewell is conducting a campaign against Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery. His other reviews of NPG shows tend to confirm this.

Anyway, if you want to read Brian Sewell’s chaotic review, click here.

For the Sewell interview – he thinks he “goes against the tide” – see here the Wimbledon edition of September 2008’s Time & Leisure.

The 1938 Eliot portrait was rejected by the Royal Academy – but not because it had a phallus in the background. Curator Paul Edwards says in the catalogue that it was the “scrolls” on the wall behind Eliot to which the RA objected – and then goes on to identify the one on the left as phallic, which it is. Critics jumped to the conclusion that the RA had made a similar identification, but they didn’t. There wouldn’t have been time, when the painting was judged, for the close examination required.

Peter Campbell, writing in the London Review of Books, made this assumption, and Edwards sent a letter which the LRB published. This letter read, as sent:

Dear Sir 

Peter Campbell (‘At The National Portrait Gallery’, 11 September) shares what seems now to be a common misapprehension about the Royal Academy’s rejection of Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of T. S. Eliot – that it was a result of the selection committee having ‘spotted phallic references in the hangings’.There is no evidence for this.

The Star reported at the time: ‘the artist departed from convention by introducing behind the sitter a light green screen with scrolls of figures which he intended to be symbolic, to suggest that the portrait is the portrait of a poet. It was apparently to these scrolls that the Academy selection committee took exception’. An Academy spokesman, on the other hand, said that it was rejected because it wasn’t as good as the pictures that were accepted.

It is actually extremely doubtful whether the committee would have noticed anything phallic in either of the ‘scrolls’, or connected the chess piece, birds, and ship with Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was just that by their ‘strict criteria’ it was not a good portrait; just as by Campbell’s strict criteria – what are they, by the way? – Wyndham Lewis did not produce ‘great portraits’.

I am sure, on the other hand, that Campbell is right that Sickert would not have committed his telegraphed praise of Lewis as ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’ to public print (it was John Rothenstein who did this). Perhaps I can also correct my own mistake in the exhibition’s catalogue. The telegram was actually sent to Desmond Harmsworth, not Lewis himself.

Yours faithfully
Paul Edwards
(Joint curator, ‘Wyndham Lewis Portraits’)

This letter was edited before publication, and website readers may be interested to see how that was done. Notice that a challenge to Peter Campbell to make his critical criteria clear is deleted – can’t have correspondents challenging reviewers!

Show/hide the letter as edited:

Dear Sir

Peter Campbell (‘At The National Portrait Gallery’, 11 September) shares what seems now to be a common misapprehension about the Royal Academy’s rejection of claims that Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of T. S. Eliot – that it was a result of was rejected by the Royal Academy because the selection committee having ‘spotted phallic references in the hangings’. There is no evidence for this.

The Star reported at the time: ‘the artist departed from convention by introducing behind the sitter a light green screen with scrolls of figures which he intended to be symbolic, to suggest that the portrait is the portrait of a poet. It was apparently to these scrolls that the Academy selection committee took exception’. An spokesman for the Academy spokesman, on the other hand, however, said that it was rejected because it wasn’t as good as the pictures those that were accepted.

It is actually extremely doubtful whether the committee would have noticed anything phallic in either of the ‘scrolls’, or connected the chess piece, birds, and ship with Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was just that bBy their ‘strict criteria’ it was not a good portrait; just as by Campbell’s strict criteria – what are they, by the way? – Wyndham Lewis did not produce ‘great portraits’.

I am sure, on the other hand, that Campbell is right that Sickert would not have committed his telegraphed praise of Lewis as ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’ to public print (it was John Rothenstein who did this). Perhaps I can also correct my own mistake in the exhibition’s catalogue. The telegram was actually sent to Desmond Harmsworth, not Lewis himself.

This mistake spread into news coverage of the exhibition. The Independent published an item purporting to explain why the T.S. Eliot portrait was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1939. This story is wrong, however. It was not rejected because the viewing panel identified a phallus in the background. At the Royal Academy the submitted pictures were held up at a distance, and passed by the panel quite quickly. Paul Edwards – co-curator of the exhibition – wrote an unpublished letter to the Independent:

Dear Sir: Hard though it may now be to believe, the tradesmen of the Royal Academy rejected Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of T.S. Eliot in 1938 (‘Banned Eliot Portrait goes on show’) simply because it looked too modern and outlandish to them, or ‘not good enough’ as they put it. Decency was not an issue, and it is doubtful that anyone noticed any phallic shape in the background – which is a bit of a Rorschach test anyway. They could not tolerate the presence of decorative abstractions as such, and probably had no idea that the birds, ship and angel-forms they also contain had any relevance to the imaginative world of Eliot's The Waste Land. Had they heard of it?

Read the misleading report in full here

In the Times of 31 May, critic Matthew Collings attempted an ungainly comparison of Lewis and Van Dyck, Andy Warhol and photography. On the T.S. Eliot portrait, he writes “You feel any photo of Eliot would reveal more about him”. On the Sitwell portrait, he writes:

“It’s more a kind of laboured graphic elegance – which today seems both modern and quaint – combined with an almost corny vision of poetic or authorial greatness. Even the furniture seems tense.”

He ends by suggesting that compared to portraits by Rembrandt or Rubens, “There is nothing like this in modern art. After a certain moment in history, for good or bad, culture just isn’t set up to produce it.”

If you want to read more extravagant generalizations, go here

Another preview by Morgan Falconer for The Lady of 14 July is of some interest. Go here

There is little of interest in Martin Gayford’s depressing review for Bloomberg.com, to be found here
—though he does say that where self-publicity is concerned, Lewis “was a forerunner of Gilbert & George and Tracey Emin in that department.”

The Daily Telegraph made the same mistake as the Independent about the Royal Academy and the supposed indecency of the T.S. Eliot portrait. Here

Tom Lubbock is the outstanding reviewer of art in British journalism today. His discussion of the Wyndham Lewis Portraits exhibition in the Independent is evidence that powerful and intelligent art criticism can be written by a reviewer working weekly.
He has been writing well about Lewis for many years.
Last year One of the Stations of the Dead was discussed in his weekly “Great Works” column in the Independent. His 1992 review of the Imperial War Museum WL: Art and War show was entitled “Oh, what a lovely war artist!” (Independent on Sunday, 28 June 1992).
Lubbock has a long back-story in properly understanding Lewis, and his review is by far the best account of the Portraits show.

Ian Sinclair, too, has a long history of interest in Lewis. His novel Dining on Stones (2004), makes reference to Lewis – see my account in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Readers familiar with Lewis’s “Enemy of the Stars” will notice that Sinclair quotes that difficult text more than once in his Guardian review. This is because, as a poet in the 1970s, Sinclair entitled a section of his 1979 book Suicide Bridge “The Enemy of the Stars”, whilst in Lud Heat (1975) he refers to “the gigantic cosmic engineerings of Lewis’s Human Age”. Here is someone who knows his Lewis, and it shows in his perceptive review. Iain Sinclair gives the best account of the current critical situation:

“The English art-noticing classes, a voluble minority, have never had much time for Percy Wyndham Lewis. But they do know one thing, they prefer to dislike him as a writer (racist, misogynist, premature Hitler enthusiast) than as a painter. […] The literary works are anathematised, allowed to drift, harmlessly, out of print. The paintings, for the most part, are confined to provincial museums, private collections, Texas depositories.” (Guardian Review, 12 July 2008)

Slight exaggeration, of course, but a precise overview of the critical response to the National Portrait Gallery show. The reviewers’ most frequent strategy was to vilify Lewis’s politics in the first paragraph, declare his literary work unreadable in the second, and in the third exalt his art to the skies.
 
This was the line taken by Rachel Campbell-Johnson in the Times, Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times, and (to an extraordinary degree), by Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times. Laura Cumming did a milder version in the Observer, but her review was altogether better.
Setting aside Matthew Collings’s eccentric efforts to join everything to everything else, this leaves two strong reviews: Sinclair’s own, and above all Tom Lubbock’s. Recommended.— Alan Munton.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times comes out strongly for Lewis, though it takes her a while to get there. Her concluding paragraph has real poignancy. She admires him as a draughtsman, but thinks that Edith Sitwell was associated with the Bloomsburys (which she was not), and that was why Lewis left her hands out of the great oil portrait (it was not – the hands were left out of the preparatory drawing too). Campbell-Johnston, originally a poetry critic (with a PhD), used to work for the Times obituary department, and nowadays moonlights for BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves, where she shows herself an insufficiently incisive interviewer. If she had questioned the received view of Lewis a little more energetically, she might have produced a better review.

Jackie Wullschlager of the Financial Times is also a literary person, with two biographies of children’s writers published – one is on Hans Christian Andersen. Her biography of Marc Chagall has just been published. Perhaps it is not surprising that the biographer of J.M. Barrie and A.A. Milne should think that “Lewis was a forgettable writer” – and yet she has evidently read quite a few of his words, and incorporates them to his discredit, quoting without explanation the remark that Virginia Woolf inhabited a “highbrow feminist fairyland”, and proposing that Lewis represents her as “fey”. Too much fairyland about this critic.

The first work to be seen at the entrance to the exhibition is Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920-1), in which Lewis shows his teeth. This set off a curious reaction in four of our reviewers, as researcher Jan Cox has shrewdly noticed. A rictus, the reader needs to be reminded, is “The expanse of an open mouth…a gaping grimace”, like a bird opening wide its beak.

• Tom Lubbock wrote in 2005: “This physiognomy, jammed in a grinning rictus, jutting like a phallus against a hot mustard background…”.
• On this occasion, 2008, Lubbock wrote: “On a mustard yellow ground, a monstrous, phallic, rictus-grinning head rises before us”.
• Waldemar Januszczak wrote: “a grinning, vorticist Lucifer [in which he] shows himself sporting an insanely toothy rictus.”
• Laura Cumming wrote that “the artist appears […] hard as metal against a fierce mustard ground. His smile is a sneering rictus”.
  

How do they do it? And do they know what a rictus is?
Compare Lewis’s friend James Joyce, who is accurate about words:
A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Waldemar Januszczak, ‘Yes, he was a fascist sympathiser, but’, Culture section, The Sunday Times, July 6 2008

Here we go again. Reading Waldemar Januszczak’s review of the Lewis exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I couldn’t help but think it a shame that a sizeable proportion of exhibition-goers will have had their opinions pre-constituted by reviews such as this. It’s a review that mistakes lazy repetitions of tired biographical tidbits for journalistic panache, and draws on kinds of rhetoric which Lewis himself tirelessly criticized to promote outworn, outmoded, and (I suspect) second-hand judgments which have long been dismantled by specialist scholars.

One of Lewis’s recurring imperatives was ‘the injunction to look behind everything…as a matter of routine, and challenge all “face values.”’ I can think of no better spirit in which to approach this ‘review’, which is as polemically biased as it claims its subject to be.

The sleight of hand begins in the lengthy by-line: ‘Yes, he was a fascist sympathiser, but the firebrand vorticist Wyndham Lewis is still one of our finest portraitists.’ The ‘yes…but’ construction admits a weakness (Lewis’s ‘fascism’) in order to commend a talent (his skill as a painter). It is Januszczak rhetorically covering himself in case he is accused of the same sympathies he so inaccurately locates in Lewis. A noticeable ‘of course’ further gives away Januszczak’s game. With one hand he invites us to think of Lewis as a figure who ‘saw himself as one of those rare artists who is also a major literary figure’, and then: ‘It wasn’t true, of course, and apart from the odd searing insight and brilliantly evil put-down, his literary output is embarrassing.’ The use of an ‘of course’ pretends to convey ‘knowledge’ that is already accepted so as to allow Januszczak to get on with the real business of (sort of) praising Lewis’s portraiture. This ‘knowledge’ – the view that Lewis lacked literary talent – isn’t accepted at all, except by those who haven’t read him or haven’t read him carefully. Januszczak is one of them, it seems.

Cue Hitler (1931). Januszczak trots out Lewis’s lamentably ill-considered examination (not approbation) of National Socialism, but doesn’t mention its belated companion piece, The Hitler Cult (1939), in which the earlier book’s arguments are recanted. There are moments of anti-Semitism in Lewis’s work. Lewis despised Jews, Januszczak tells us. What about the misleadingly-titled The Jews: Are They Human? (1939), in which Lewis deconstructs and rejects anti-Semitic discourse? One wonders how long these half-truths are going to do the rounds without the more considered commentaries due to them. (Consideration they have in fact already received in the pages of the Wyndham Lewis Annual and in texts such as Paul Edwards’s Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer [2000]).

Finally, it is a relief to learn that Januszczak deems Lewis the unsurpassed portraitist ‘of [his] era’s finest writers’, even if this does appear to downgrade Lewis the ‘literary loony’ from ‘the finest British portraitist of the 20th century’ to something of a niche craftsman. That said, I can’t help but think that, after all Januszczak has had to say about Lewis’s literary ‘failings’, this is to damn with faint praise. And I find it revealing that a review of Lewis’s portraiture spends so much space dealing with the literature it has no time for rather than just getting on with discussing the paintings themselves. I’d be inclined not to listen, and see the paintings on my own terms, first-hand, up-close, and then actually read Lewis, rather than unstoppably spewing-out cliché after cliché.

“I dislike everything about Lewis…”.   
This review is almost worthless, but the site does have a useful video of the exhibition (with an absurd commentary).

Read the full review here

“A new show at the National Portrait Gallery in London […] adds up to a picture as rich, paradoxical and self-contradictory as any top-notch New York analyst might ever wish for.”
“Lewis was brilliantly cruel, in print, to most of the people whose portraits hang in these rooms. He hated Virginia Woolf and all that she represented - we see that in the way he has chosen to draw her here. Her face looks simian and rubbery; her hands are huge, clumsy, ill-placed, almost out of control.
“And yet, in many of these portraits, there is a huge degree of sympathy for, and understanding of, the sitter. Consider his great portrait of Eliot, which the Royal Academy had the folly to reject in 1938. The fact is that Lewis has seen through to the man behind the mask of the sleek and suave cultural diplomat. He sees how precarious that mask is, and at what expense to the inner man it has been adopted. The quality and depth of Lewis's penetration of the great poet leaves all questions of satire limping along behind.
“He saw how laughably horrible it all was, all this drawing-room flapping and flummery, and how, perhaps, it even deserved our limited pity.”
Read the full review here

Compare this with the New Statesman’s comments on psychoanalysis:
“Lewis was more interested in recording the various performances a person could put on than in trying to grasp some essential self. He depicted an individual in terms of what he saw — the exterior, visible shell — and made no attempt at psychological analysis. (How refreshing in this age of fetishized analysis and psychobabble.) Of course, in the process of keen and concentrated looking, he saw rather more than the average self-obsessed therapist ever sees.”
Read the full review here

Here

This local newspaper serves Hampstead in London, and the review is keyed to Lewis’s London connections.
Here