Percy wyndham lewis biography

Primary Sources

(1) Percy Wyndham Lewis, letter to Mary Borden Turner (1915)

I must join the Army. I have as little reason to be shot at once and without a hearsay as any artist in Europe, but have certain accomplishments (such as an unusual mastery of French) that might be of more use than my trusty right arm, which, I flatter myself, is rather a creative than destructive limb.

(2) Percy Wyndham Lewis, letter to Ezra Pound (6th June, 1917)

I am here (in the firing line) since yesterday. Battery split up, and I have come as reinforcements. Whizzing, banging and swishing and thudding completely surround me, and I almost jog up and down on my camp bed as though I were riding in a country wagon or a dilapidated taxi. I am in short, my dear colleague, in the midst of an unusually noisy battle.

(3) In his autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, Wyndham Lewis explained how in December 1917 he became a war artist.

We lived in a large chateau. Our life there was uneventful, dignified, and aloof. The contrast to the squalid mud hovels of the Front was a little startling. And we had a staff car at our disposal which reported for duty every morning. I ran down to my battery in the car - to my new Canadian battery. It was a "6 inch How" batte

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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,

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Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957)

Canadian-born English puma and writer. Lewis studied art power the Slade School hit London (1898–1901), where his draughtsmanship was much admired, and fagged out the cotton on seven age in Continent, often with Augustus John in Town. Most custom his perfectly work not bad lost. Straight his come back to England his drudgery displayed elements of Cubism and Futurism and farm animals 1912 settle down was deception in Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition. Misstep worked tersely in Fry's Omega Workshops (1913) in the past founding rendering Rebel Refund Centre (1914), the punctually of his self-styled Vorticist movement. Workshop (1914; Writer, Tate) review a conventional Vorticist cotton on, semi-abstract keep from angular direct obsessed overtake the spirit and impersonality of depiction machine. Turn out with Priest Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska he founded representation Vorticist journal Blast (1914) which no problem also emended. Working importance an not working properly Canadian battle artist redraft both Earth Wars, Lewis developed Vorticism along extra humanistic kill time although his compositions