Lewis in Spain

NEW EXHIBITIONS

• Madrid Exhibition: Wyndham Lewis (Amherst, Nova Scotia, 1882-Londres, 1957)
  There is to be a major exhibition of Lewis’s paintings and drawings at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, from 5 February to 16 May 2010. Manuel Fontán del Junco, the director of the Foundation is the main organiser, and Paul Edwards and Richard Humphreys – fresh from curating the successful National Portrait Gallery show – will be curating again.
  Further information here.
  
  Read Alan Munton's article in the last Lewisletter (27) on this event:
  
  Biggest-ever Lewis show for Madrid
  by Alan Munton
  
  The largest exhibition of Wyndham Lewis’s art ever held opens in Madrid in February. It will be at the Fundación Juan March from 5 February until 16 May 2010. Co-curators Paul Edwards and Richard Humphreys promise “the most comprehensive and memorable exhibition of the Enemy's art” seen for thirty years.
  
  The organizers are Manuel Fontán del Junco, the Director of Exhibitions at the Foundation, and his colleague María Zozaya. Humphreys speaks of their "sheer enthusiasm" for Lewis’s work.
  
  There will be 160 paintings and drawings, and over 60 books, magazines, and catalogues. Particularly strong is the section of early work from 1900 to 1913, as are the "Imaginative Compositions" of 1933-1938. Most intriguing will be the group of works from 1920-29 brought together as “Synthetic Abstraction”.
  
  Lewis’s war art from the Second World War receives its due for the first time. And the portraits and figurative work are as strong as might be expected. Many Vorticist works have disappeared over the years, and the seventeen to be shown in Madrid are as full a group as we are likely to see.
  
  A comprehensive illustrated catalogue of the exhibits will include essays by leading Lewis scholars. There is to be an edition of Timon of Athens which will bring Shakespeare’s text and Lewis’s designs together for the first time. And there will be a Spanish translation of Blast by Yolanda Morató.
  
  “The signs are that the Spanish audience are eager to see Britain's foremost modernist”, says Dick Humphreys. He adds: “It is fitting that Madrid should be the venue, because Lewis was a student there at the turn of the last century, looking for a more promising context for the development of his talent than London. Plus ça change!”
  
  The catalogue, the Spanish Blast, and the edition of Timon will add three significant publications to the recent upsurge of interest in Lewis. Lewis’s new importance has been particularly apparent in Spain in recent years.

FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

• Vorticism exhibition in US, Italy and UK
  Early shows reconstructed
  Mark Antliff of Duke University, USA, is collaborating with Vivien Greene, Curator at the Guggenheim in New York, to recreate, as much as possible, the three major Vorticist exhibitions that occurred during World War One:
  • the Doré Gallery show of June 1915 in London;
  • the Penguin Club exhibition of January 1917 in New York City;
  • the exhibition of Alvin Langdon Coburn's "Vortographs" that took place in February 1917 at the Camera Club in London.

  The exhibition will open at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in the autumn (fall) of 2010, and will then travel to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in the Spring of 2011, and to Tate Britain in the Summer of 2011.
  It will be the first large-scale exhibition of Vorticist works held in the United States and in Italy.
  Mark Antliff has recently published, with Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914 (Chicago, 2008). He is Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
  
  

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

• Paris
  Le Futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive, which included Lewis’s The Crowd, together with work by Gaudier, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Epstein, transferred from the Pompidou Centre to Tate Modern, and showed from June to September 2009.  The catalogue is available in both French and English versions.
  
  

NEW BOOKS

• In Spain, an excellent translation of Blasting and Bombardiering has been published by Impedimenta of Madrid. The translation is by Yolanda Morató. There is an accurate and informative introduction by Juan Bonilla.
  Estallidos y bombardeos.  Traducción del inglés de Yolanda Morató, introducción de Juan Bonilla.
  http://www.impedimenta.es/novedades.htm
  
  
  • Lewis translation wins prize
    Yolanda Morató’s translation of Blasting and Bombardiering has won the AEDEAN translation prize. Read about it here.
    
    
• Future publications
  A new facsimile of Blast was published in 2009 by Gingko Press and Thames and Hudson, with an introduction by Paul Edwards.
  A new edition of the 1928 version of Tarr, edited by Scott Klein, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
  Oneworld Classics have taken over the Lewis titles previously published by John Calder. An edition of The Human Age trilogy, with new Introductions, is promised.
  In Brazil, Tessitura Editora will publish a Portuguese translation of Tarr, with more Lewis titles to follow if this is successful.
  Impedimenta will publish next Yolanda Morató’s Spanish translation of The Apes of God, as Los monos de Dios, and then Tarr.
  Penguin Books are to reprint their editions of Revenge for Love and The Wild Body,

Updated: January 2010