Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

There will be blood | 29 June 2017

A superb retrospective at IWM North makes no apology for the painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights

Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the ‘atrocious’ Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat ‘Belgian bumpkins’ of Peter Paul Rubens; men who read detective stories and women who liked bowl-of-apple paintings by second-rate Cézannes. People who lived in Putney.

The poet Edith Sitwell, who sat for an unfinished portrait by Lewis, was one of his ‘most hoary, tried and reliable enemies…I do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwell’s favourite enemy.’ Sitwell was a fierce opponent. ‘When worsted in argument, she throws Queensberry Rules to the winds. She once called me Percy.’ He had been born Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), but was Wyndham by the time he was old enough for Rugby and the Slade.

His best enemies were the Bloomsbury Set, those ‘Fitzroy tinkerers’ and conscientious objectors, who spent the war pruning trees and planting gooseberries in Sussex, while he watched rats bicker for cheese at Passchendaele. The Bloomsbury grievance kept him going for decades. Roger Fry, director of the Omega Workshops, was a Pecksniff, a hypocrite, a shabby trickster, whose chairs stuck to the seat of one’s trousers. The critic Raymond Mortimer was a ‘middle aged man-milliner’. Virginia Woolf was a timid ‘peeper’ at the lives of others; her A Room of One’s Own a ‘highbrow feminist fairyland’. A Lewis review never failed to give Woolf one of her headaches. ‘I’ve taken the arrow of W.L. to my heart,’ she wrote after one attack in 1934. She was ‘decapitated’ by him in 1938, and awaited his ‘poisoned dart’ in 1940.

He styled himself ‘The Enemy’ and imagined swaggering out in a Stetson, a cigar between his teeth, swinging bandoliers loaded with vitriol.

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