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Shifting truths

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Wyndham Lewis Portraits (National Portrait Gallery until 19 October)

As the exhibition’s organisers, Paul Edwards and Richard Humphreys, write in the handsome and informative catalogue (£15 in paperback): ‘In the deepest sense he was a pluralist, aware that no single, completely coherent personality could reflect the full range of truth about anything...’ Lewis was more interested in recording the various performances a person could put on than in trying to grasp some essential self. He depicted an individual in terms of what he saw — the exterior, visible shell — and made no attempt at psychological analysis. (How refreshing in this age of fetishised analysis and psychobabble.) Of course, in the process of keen and concentrated looking, he saw rather more than the average self-obsessed therapist ever sees.

Look, for instance, at his famous portrait of Edith Sitwell, shown here surrounded by three drawings of her and one of her brother Sacheverell. Lewis was one of the few men ever to make a pass at Miss Sitwell. She thought herself ugly, rather than magnificent-looking and arresting, and thought her hands were her only elegant feature. Lewis depicts her as if she were machine-made, a mannikin with no hands at all. (The drawings are altogether more revealing.) Virginia Woolf, by comparison, is shown with enormous, coarse labourer’s hands and a small, cadaverous head. Continue on round this room to find Nancy Cunard fashion-plate willowy in Venice, Edward Wadsworth with features faint as a developing negative, and the music critic Edwin Evans tough and unyielding in an armchair.

The main room contains dynamic portraits of Pound, Joyce and Naomi Mitchison, Rebecca West as one always imagines her, a heavily worked pencil study of G.K. Chesterton looking like a slightly benevolent bull at bay, while the last room concentrates on portraits of Mrs Lewis. There’s also a second late portrait of Eliot, lamentably weak, and not a patch on the drawing made for it. However, there are too many fine things here to mention, and a visit to the show is highly recommended.