Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), painter, novelist, and critic. Lewis was born on a yacht off the North American coast on November 11, 1882, and after his parents' separation moved to England with his mother in 1893. He was educated at Rugby and the Slade School of Art. After living in Paris, and establishing a reputation among the avant-garde (1901-1909), Lewis published two issues of BLAST—the Review of the Great English Vortex (1914-1915) with Ezra Pound. During World War I he served as a gunner and a war artist. His novels (Tarr, 1918; The Human Age trilogy, 1928-1955; The Apes of God, 1930) are savagely mocking, and as a critic he attacked Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, and Faulkner. “The Comic...” he wrote “results from the observation of a thing behaving like a person”. He lived in the United States during World War II. Parts of an autobiography were published as Blasting and Bombadiering (1937), and Rude Assignment (1950). In 1956 the Tate Gallery put on a retrospective exhibition: Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, but by then he had been blind for two years. He died in London on March 7, 1957.