Here's some tunes from the Edinburgh easy listening club Going Places that I ran with Murray McKean and Andy Blundel in the late nineties.
Bobbi Jean & The Scots Boys - Oba Oba
Miss X - Christine
Mel Torme - My Little Red Book
Joe Loss - Theme from Maigret
Ella Fitzgerald - Sunshine Of Your Love
The Sandpipers - Never Can Say Goodbye
Sammy Davis Jr - Chico & The Man
Georgie Fame - Peaceful
Theme from Barbarella
Jackie Wilson - Light My Fire
Theme from Midnight Cowboy
Bobby Darin - Beautiful Things
Nelson Riddle Orchestra - Lamento
Frank Sinatra - Blow Your Horn
Howard Roberts Quartet - Dirty Bossa Nova
Sergio Mendes - Look Around
Shirley Bassey - Day By Day
This photograph shows some of Lewis’s future colleagues in the Royal Garrison Artillery in France in March 1917. Lewis joined the RGA in June. These men are carrying duckboards across a frozen canal. Later, Lewis’s war drawings will often show men crossing muddy battle sites using duckboards.
Source: The western front in 1917-1919 and now - interactive. The Guardian. First World War - 100 years on. Series: Photography then and now.
Peter Bazalgette, former TV producer and now chair of Arts Council England, talks about WL's portrait of Edith Sitwell: and he talks good sense throughout!
Wyndham Lewis, the master of Vorticist art who became a soldier at Ypres, wrote of the Great War that it “went on far too long… It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything – that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.” [….]
It was Lewis’s idea – that war was ultimately devoid of meaning – which my father was, I think, trying to capture when he described the 1914-18 conflict to me in his hospital room as “just one great waste”.
A complete edition of Wyndham Lewis’s work is to be published by Oxford University Press. The Collected Works will be overseen by Paul Edwards, as general editor. The Delegates of OUP – academics who oversee the policy of the Press – accepted a detailed proposal in May 2013.
Paul Edwards said: “I could scarcely believe it last year when OUP contacted me and asked me to make a proposal for a collected Wyndham Lewis. Getting the books back into print has so far been a real problem. Since Black Sparrow wound up, there has been no publisher willing to commit themselves properly to Lewis. For OUP now to be prepared to put everything back into print – and in carefully edited scholarly editions – is almost incredible. Suddenly Lewis makes the grade in the closest thing there is to official canonisation in this country: a collected edition published by one of the world’s most distinguished academic publishers.”
Editors for each volume will be assigned, and a meeting of possible contributors is planned to take place shortly – possibly at the Modernist Studies Conference at the University of Sussex in Brighton between 29 August and 1 September.
A timeline is being discussed with OUP, but there is little doubt that the project will take several years to complete. Grants will be applied for in order to supplement the Press’s own financial support. Funds will be sought in the United States as well as in Britain.
The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, as holder of the Lewis copyright, will take part in the contract negotiations. The Delegates asked that the list of projected volume editors be extended “to bring some [more] women on board”.
There were enthusiastic congratulations to Paul Edwards for successfully organizing the project and for drafting a prospectus outlining the intended contents and the editorial methodology of the forty-plus volume edition. Ian Patterson of Cambridge University’s Faculty of English wrote that “the OUP Delegates deserve a round of applause” for their decision, and Scott Klein (whose edition of Tarr for Oxford World’s Classics may well have sparked the press’s interest in Lewis) added that it was “amazing, groundbreaking news”.
There’s a doubtful piece of anti-Lewis “scholarship” in the essay on Bloomsbury in the MoMA catalogue.
This time Lewis is guilty of gender prejudice against the artists of Bloomsbury. Matthew Affron writes:
Lewis denigrated Bloomsbury in order to promote Vorticism, with its stark forms, mechanical and impersonal handling, and aggressive ethos. Bloomsbury, meanwhile, aligned its ethos of aesthetic openness with toleration on questions of gender and sexuality. (p. 184)
This is argument by free association. Affron is asking us to believe that because Vorticism was “stark…mechanical…and aggressive”, therefore Lewis (or Vorticism) was sexually aggressive and intolerant. It doesn’t make any sense, but joins that group of crass absurdities which has disfigured the criticism of Vorticism over the years.
Affron goes on to say that Bloomsbury’s toleration was “crucial” for Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who had “a romantic and working partnership”, one that “allowed space for Grant’s homosexuality”. Good for Bloomsbury. But what on earth does this have to do with Vorticism, except as an exercise in casual denigration?
There is no aesthetic link between Grant’s sexuality and Vorticist art.
There is no link between this account of Vorticism and the sentimental view of Bloomsbury’s sexual merry-go-round.
In any case, did Bloomsbury really possess “aesthetic openness”? It engaged very briefly with abstraction, and touched only lightly upon Picasso. By 1931 Roger Fry was writing that Cubism “exercised almost no appeal [for him] except by its formal arrangement”.
The not-very-good Abstract Painting (c. 1914) by Vanesss Bell which illustrates Affron’s essay shows how feeble was Bloomsbury’s engagement with abstraction. This “openness” led nowhere.
Affron’s account of Vorticism as mechanical and aggressive shows that he hasn’t looked at the art very closely, and is repeating views which were current twenty or thirty years ago.
Was Gaudier-Brzeska mechanical? Are Lewis’s dancing couples anything but intensely sexual? Are Wadsworth’s Vorticist woodcuts not delicate and engaging?
Matthew Affron has just been appointed Curator of Modern Art at Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.
Let’s hope he can learn to construct a sensible argument while he’s there.
TEN THINGS you THOUGHT you knew about WYNDHAM LEWIS
By Alan Munton
1. Should he be called Percy Wyndham Lewis?
No. He never used that name. The closest was “P. Wyndham Lewis” or “P.W.L.”, to sign some early artworks and stories, and Tarr (1919). He used “W.L.” and “Wyndham Lewis” at the same time.
There is no reason to use “Percy”. People who do so are usually trying to mock him.
Like anybody else, Lewis should be given the name he chose for himself.
2. So where did the name come from?
From Sir Percy Wyndham, an eccentric commander in the American Civil War. He was admired by Lewis’s father, Charles, who also fought in the Civil War. Find out about him here
Sir Percy (1833-1879) had moustaches ten inches wide, was a risk-taking soldier, fought alongside Garibaldi, and died at 300 feet in an exploding balloon of his own invention.
Almost certainly not. Everybody loves this story, but the facts are against it. Lewis was born on 18 November 1882. His father’s yacht, the Wanda, was built in 1883.
Lewis was probably born in Amherst, Nova Scotia. His father owned the Wanda only from 1888. See the entertaining account in Paul O’Keeffe’s biography, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, 4-8.
4. Did Ezra Pound edit BLAST?
No. This ideastarted up in the US in the late 1940s.
It was part of the defence of Pound, then in St Elisabeths Hospital as the alternative to a treason trial. Pound was controversially awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949, and history was revised to help him. John Berryman wrote in Partisan Review in April 1949 that “Pound […] had launched Vorticism, in the opening Blast [of 1914].”
Lewis replied ironically: “That Blast was my idea, that I was the editor, that in short the whole show was mine, that finally vorticism was purely a painters affair [as distinct from Pound’s literary imagism] need not worry you. I should be a very fussy person if I expected people to bother about details of this order. Indeed I was rather gratified to see my name at all. – I apologise for my intrusion”. (Letters 492).
Astonishingly, the fiction that Pound helped to edit Blast is still current.
5. Was Lewis an anti-semite?
Anthony Julius doesn’t think so.
Lewis’s anti-Semitism was “essentially trivial”, he wrote in T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism, and literary form (1995, 2003). And Julius is a hard man to please on this matter.
6. And what did Lewis say about Jews?
“We must give all people of Jewish race a new deal among us”. [Written in 1938]
"The average intellectual endowment of the Jew is much more considerable than is the case with his Gentile neighbor. The Jews share out more than we do – they are more communist, in the ordinary sense. And they share out their intelligence, among other things”. (68)
“It can, as a matter of fact, be very easily demonstrated how nearly every disobliging thing that is said about the Jew can with equal truth be said about the Gentile” (61)
“All bankers are not Jewish – would that they were!” (98)
[On the Jewish contribution to architecture, painting and sculpture:] “We should, I think, thank the Jew for being so unorthodox, and shaking up our stale old artistic stock-in-trade as he has done; not revile him”. (86)
“All attempts in the past to separate the God of Justice from the God of Love – from Marcion downwards – have failed. For better or for worse, the Jews and ourselves worship the same God, and the Founder of our religion was a Jewish carpenter’s son”. (53)
All quotations are from The Jews Are They Human?, published in 1939.
7. Why did Lewis call his 1939 pro-Jewish book The Jews Are They Human?
Because of this:
8. What were Lewis’s politics?
He was an anarchist more than someone politically on the right.
See Alan Munton on Lewis’s politics.
9. Who invented the phrase “the global village”?
It wasn’t Marshall McLuhan.
In America and Cosmic Man Lewis wrote:
“[N]ow that the earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe…”.
In his copy, McLuhan wrote “global village” in the margin. He never acknowledged the source of his most influential idea.
America and Cosmic Man was published in London in 1948, and in New York in 1949. It was written earlier, and was the outcome of his years in the USA and Canada during the Second World War.
10. Was Wyndham Lewis a great twentieth century artist?
Here is an analysis of what Matthew Gale says about Vorticism in the final paragraph of his essay for the MoMA catalogue for Inventing Abstraction. Gale is Head of Displays at Tate Modern, London. The essay is entitled “Vorticism: Planetary Abstraction”.
Are these the most ridiculous 107 words ever written about Vorticism?
"With Vorticists gradually returning to the figure during the war, it could be argued that the ultimate formulation of their machinist and nationalist vision was found in an unexpected quarter: Edwin Lutyens’s design of 1919 for the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the monument to commemorate the fallen (plate 138). In an architectural language not unrelated to the geometry of Vorticism, this sober articulation of planes – dynamically conceived with entasis, so that no line is strictly horizontal or vertical – avoided the symbolic personifications of other memorials. Instead, and at the moment when Vorticism was an already faltering memory, it fixed the commemoration of indescribable destruction through an idealised abstraction."
The Cenotaph, London
“returning to the figure”. Only because they had to, as war artists fulfilling a commission. Not a choice made as artists.
“their . . . nationalist vision”. Gale himself has just spent three pages showing how the Vorticists were related to Futurism, to Kandinsky, and to the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer. Now he says they are “nationalist”. Is it nationalist to write “BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND”? How can a “planetary” abstraction be nationalist? Lewis wanted English artists to be European artists as well: that’s not “nationalist”.
“their machinist . . . vision”. This is an illusion about Vorticism. There are few machines in it at all (top right of The Crowd, maybe; some guns during the war), but Vorticism is not about machines. This delusion was exploded by sensible critics years ago. Has Gale not read the scholarship?
“in an unexpected quarter”. So unexpected as to be incredible.
“Edwin Lutyens’s design . . . for the Cenotaph”. Gale thinks the Cenotaph was “nationalist”. Does he know what a Cenotaph is? It’s an empty tomb to remember people killed elsewhere, in this case all across the British Empire. It may be in built London, but it can’t be nationalist.
“to commemorate the fallen”. To describe those killed in war as “the fallen” is a cruel evasion. And sentimental too.
“not unrelated to”. Used when you know it doesn’t fit, but want to pretend that it does. See “it could be argued” in the first sentence.
“the geometry of Vorticism”. Does the Cenotaph really look like Lewis’s The Crowd, or one of Wadsworth’s woodcuts? Vorticist “geometry” is complex, varied, and – unlike the Cenotaph – has vitality and energy. The dozen illustrations to Gale’s essay in the catalogue contradict this remark.
“this sober articulation of planes”. Or: a dull, stolid lump of uninteresting horizontals and verticals.
“dynamically conceived”. A joke. Does Gale know how to look?
. Entasis. An attempt to impress. Means Lutyens made the sides not quite vertical, so that if extended they would meet 300m above the structure. Invisible to anyone looking at the Cenotaph from the ground. How could this infinitesimal curve away from the vertical be equivalent to the dynamic diagonals of Vorticism?
“avoided the symbolic personifications of other memorials”. Correct, and the only true remark so far. But a problem in logic for Gale: if the Cenotaph avoids symbolism, and Vorticism avoids symbolism, does it follow that Vorticism resembles the Cenotaph?
“[when in 1919] Vorticism was an already faltering memory”. A patronising remark implying that Vorticism was feeble. Matthew Gale, as Head of Displays, has himself hung works from this “faltering” movement at Tate Modern.
“commemoration of indescribable destruction through an idealised abstraction”. Afflatus. Tries to join death and suffering to an empty idea.
Hal Foster, the prominent US art critic, writes an essay for the catalogue of MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction, entitled “Sense and Non-Sense”. He also writes a review of the exhibition for the London Review of Books. Some people might think there was an ethical problem here. But when publicity is all…perhaps not.
In the review, Foster mentions Duncan Grant twice, but Lewis not at all.
Grant, admitted to be a “lesser” figure, has his day in this show, we are told; and Grant is also responsible for an “unexpected” project. This is a reference to his feeble attempts at abstraction: Interior at Gordon Square (1915-15), and In Memoriam: Rupert Brooke (1915), and perhaps more so to his Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound of 1914.
This an awkward paper-on-canvas moving roll decorated with abstract rectangular shapes to be played to the slow movement of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
There is also a film of this from 1974, and this, no doubt, is the “project”. It was not completed at the time because, Grant said in 1974, he “did not receive much encouragement” in 1914.
That is hardly surprising: Bloomsbury’s interest in abstraction was superficial and brief. (Look at Roger Fry’s efforts!) For Grant it led nowhere, and he soon returned to a smudgy impressionism, never more to trouble anyone with avant-garde ideas.
It is a mystery why Hal Foster, radical, leftist and ultra-theorist from October magazine, should be promoting this stuff.
Is he suffering from the same problem as we’ve noticed on this site with T.J. Clark: that all the long-standing leftists are becoming more conservative as they age?
The Museum of Modern Art in New York is very proud of a vector map that “explains” the relationships between the 83 artists in its current show, Inventing Abstraction. The idea is to draw lines connecting all the artists who knew each other, or wrote to each other, in order to show how abstraction came into being.
The idea is cribbed from – sorry, is “a tip of the hat” to – the chart that Alfred Barr, Jr put on the cover of his Cubism and Modern Art exhibition in 1936. That famous diagram joins Cézanne to Cubism, and Dadaism to Surrealism. It’s all about how art movements reacted to each other, and it’s a brilliant explainer.
Trouble is, the new one alters the principle, so the artists had to know each other in order to be included. Where did this slightly odd idea come from?
These “connectors” can “do the social work of many”. For abstraction, this meant Kandinsky and Apollinaire in particular. And on the MoMA map these two have dozens of connections, or vectors.
Who, then, is Malcolm Gladwell? He is one of those curious intellectual figures thrown up by the culture of New York journalism, and who at first sight seem to be vital and radical figures, and then – on further inspection – not.
Gladwell made his reputation on the New Yorker back in the 1990s, and is still writing for them. Blink (2005) is about the “big question” of how and why people make decisions very quickly. It sold massively. Outliers (2008) is about the way our environment affects personal success. The word “outlier” is already used by supposedly in-touch journalists as if such people are real presences in the world.
Gladwell can now command $45,000 for a speech. At the same time he has met substantial criticism from substantial thinkers who find him trivial and superficial. Boyd Tonkin, writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper, pointed out that far from being liberating, his ideas (or “ideas”) were a new form of determinism. He says, in effect, “You are this way because this thing has happened to you, and you can’t do anything about it”.
Gladwell himself was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. This is a joke town known for its dullness. He doesn’t mention it much. (The author of this discussion was born nearby: but not all of Hampshire is dull.)
And Gladwell has convinced MoMA that his ideas are valid. More fool them. Why pretend that abstraction was invented through personal contact when artists also see work in galleries, and work from reproductions in magazines and newspapers?
Leah Dickerman thinks that abstraction happened because many of these “connectors” edited reviews and little magazines, and so got to know each other. This argument looks suspiciously circular: you’re interested in abstraction, you write about it, publish examples of it, and lo and behold – the concept exists! This is simplistic. Like many of Gladwell’s ideas.
And what about the magazine readership, whose members don’t know each other? No mention of them.
MoMA put considerable resources into making this vector map. It’s entertaining, but the Gladwell idea is nonsense.
Wyndham Lewis is included in the new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, called Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925. His Portrait of an Englishwoman and Workshop are on show amongst work by 82 other artists. It’s a remarkable overview of how visual abstraction came about.
Connections – or not
Trouble is, Lewis doesn’t get the place he deserves. On a “Connections” diagram, which draws lines between artists who met or corresponded, and by doing so brought abstraction into being, Lewis is linked only to the other Vorticists in the show, Atkinson and Bomberg, Saunders and Gaudier-Brzeska.
And Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell are there through the Omega Workshops connection. Lewis’s meeting with Marinetti gets him a connection, as does “Vortograph” photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.
If that “connection” had been made, Lewis would have appeared in the same part of this interactive map as a host of influential European artists: El Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Survage, Severini, Balla and Carrà – with all of whom he had an intellectual relationship of influence and conflict.
A member of the Wyndham Lewis Society has sent polite emails to persuade the organisers of this exhibition to add to their design a link between Lewis and van Doesburg.
Nothing has happened. The Beta version of the site was made open for changes. One was asked for. But at MoMA they are very busy, they have only a small staff….
Interests – or not
The elaborate website also lists the “interests” of artists. Vanessa Bell, a minor artist by any standards, had interests in Omega and in “love triangles” – a good remark – and Duncan Grant, her lover, has the same interest, as well as ones in Roger Fry and Scriabin.
But Lewis has no “interests” at all. The space is empty.
Lewis – the artist who made Vorticism possible, set up the Rebel Art Centre, edited and produced Blast, saw the significance of Picasso and Matisse as early as 1908, drank in the same Paris cafés as Picasso and his friends, reworked Futurism, and made an Abstract Design dated 1912 – this artist, it seems, did nothing worth recording. The omission is shameful.
Surname – or not
The MoMA website has an extract from an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Leah Dickerman. She begins “Inventing Modernism” by listing, in alphabetical order, the “pioneering” abstractionists: “Hans Arp, Vanessa Bell, Sonia Delaunay-Terk…Léger, Malevich…Wyndham Lewis” (p. 11).
To put it clearly: the curator of this exhibition knows so little about Lewis that she believes that “Wyndham” is part of his surname!
Kevin Jackson’s compilation-book about What Happened in Modernism in 1922 is out. It’s called Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. It got a good review from Will Self in the Guardian, a discussion made all the better when Self pointed out that modernism actually began around 1907, with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Self mentions Lewis’s 1918 Tarr, treating it as a natural part of the landscape. It is “one of the signature works of experimental/modernist prose”.
So how does Lewis do in Kevin’s conspectus?
Lewis’s main publication of the year was the second number of The Tyro. This had prose contributions from T.S. Eliot, John Rodker, Jessica Dismorr, “Stephen Hudson” (Sydney Schiff), Herbert Read, and Waldemar George. All sound stuff, and topped off with one of Lewis’s most important discussions of art, “Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in Our Time”. And 20 artworks by Dismorr, Lipschitz, Cedric Morris, Lewis, Frank Dobson, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth.
What does Kevin do with this? He gives it a footnote on page 91. Great stuff, Kevin!
Important parts of Lewis’s biography are not neglected. Kevin has a paragraph on Lewis’s meeting with Katherine Mansfield, who was seriously ill in 1922. This was “not a happy meeting”, and Lewis made remarks about her work “that she found brutally cruel”. Kevin comments “even the thick-skinned Lewis soon realised that he had overstepped the mark”, but could not bring himself to make “a full apology”.
This example of Lewis as a “Very Bad Man” is lifted wholesale from Jeffrey Meyers’s 1980 biography of Lewis (127-8), and its seriousness drastically overstated. What Kevin fails to mention – though it’s in Meyers – is that Mansfield admired the essays and stories in The Tyro, and thought the eerie painting Room No. 59 reproduced there “was like a work of art from another planet”. Well done, Kevin!
On page 182, Kevin lists Lewis among several lovers of Nancy Cunard. (All the important things are here.) On page 359 he writes that “Lewis visited Venice in October, in the company of Nancy Cunard”. Well, yes, they were staying with other guests in Nancy’s rented house, but they didn’t fall in love until the journey back to Paris. Great research, Kevin!
In his biographical note, things begin to look up. We read this:
In the last couple of decades, however, his work as an artist has become widely discussed, frequently exhibited, and generally praised; the informed consensus now has it that he is one of the great English painters, particularly in the field of portraiture.
This shows Kevin crucially in touch with recent developments. And at last saying something worthwhile about Wyndham Lewis.
