Lewis was reputedly born aboard his father’s yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia, to an English mother and American father. He studied at the Slade School of Art and, at various stages in his early career was associated with the Camden Town Group, the Omega Workshop and the Rebel Art Centre. It was in his role as co-founder (with Ezra Pound) of the Vorticist movement however for which he is best known, praising mechanical form over natural, wishing to dissolve the narrative, affectionate and sentimental ties that bind people, and delivering his words in typically abrasive style (in the Vorticist house magazine, BLAST). He enlisted as a gunner and bombardier in the First World War, and after the third Battle of Ypres in 1917, was commissioned by both the Canadian and British governments as an official war artist. After the war, he resumed painting, but some of his more belligerent faith in progress, a.k.a. abstraction, had been knocked out of him during the war, as he witnessed the devastation on the western front. His incisive draughtsmanship however is fully in evidence in this drawing. He increasingly took to writing rather than to painting, some of his output seemingly a defence of the ideologies which were shortly to establish themselves in Nazi German.

Thresholds, British Council 2010

www.wyndhamlewis.com

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.