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Shifting truths

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Wyndham Lewis Portraits (National Portrait Gallery until 19 October)

It forms the centrepiece of this excellent tribute to Lewis’s very considerable powers as a portraitist. There are some 60 paintings and drawings on display, enough to give a good account of this superb draughtsman and (occasionally) good painter. Lewis was that rarity, an artist who was also a brilliant writer, and it seems likely that with his often precarious health he found it easier to write than to paint. Certainly he did not produce a huge body of paintings (the catalogue raisonné records just 127 oils), though he was a much more prolific draughtsman. In later years he expressed the wish that he’d painted more portraits, so he evidently valued the genre. And it can justly be said that he produced some very memorable paintings that are primarily depictions of individuals.

The visitor is greeted by the slightly menacing self-portrait ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro’ (1920–1), his teeth bared like a portcullis, his face long and angular as a hatchet. Lewis was a controversialist par excellence, the self-styled Enemy, a modernist of uncompromising views with an intellect to back them up. His incisive line is evident in a group of self-portrait drawings in the first room of the show, my favourite being the lowering ink and wash study from 1920 of our man in a big hat. He portrayed himself in different modes to show different sides of his personality, from the Cubist of 1911 to the nutty yokel of 1930, and then on to the sober businessman of 1932 and the slightly snide mocking figure with a pipe of 1938. He also painted himself as Raphael (1921), looking serene, quite a contrast to himself as the Enemy, at a combative angle to the world, economically rendered in ink and wash (1932).