Wyndham Lewis

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Wyndham Lewis, 1913

Percy Wyndham Lewis (born November 18, 1882 at sea off Nova Scotia , † March 7, 1957 in London ) was a British writer and painter. Wyndham Lewis was a co-founder of Vorticism and editor of Blast magazine .

Life

Wyndham Lewis was born on board his parents' yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia. His mother was British and his father American. He attended rugby school in England, then Slade Art School in London; He was expelled from both schools. He then traveled through Europe and then studied art in Paris for some time. He developed his typical painting and drawing style from 1913. His friend Ezra Pound coined the term vorticism for it . It is a style that is heavily influenced by Cubism , but which is clearly close to Italian Futurism in terms of dynamism . 1914/15 he was editor and most important author of the literary magazine Blast .

After the end of Vorticism, Wyndham Lewis served as a soldier on the Western Front in World War I from 1916 . Between 1918 and 1919 he was an official war painter for the Canadian government. During this time, one of his most famous works, A Battery Shelled , was created, today: Imperial War Museum , London. His first novel Tarr was published in 1918 and is considered one of the most important texts of the English-language modern age.

In the course of the 1920s Wyndham Lewis approached Italian fascism and also National Socialism . In 1931 his book Hitler appeared . The closeness to the Nazis, which was expressed in it, increasingly isolated him artistically. In 1939 The Jews, Are They Human? and The Hitler Cult , both very critical debates with the Third Reich, but which did little to rehabilitate its reputation.

Although Wyndham Lewis is best known today as a writer, he continued to paint and some of his best works were created in the 1930s and 1940s, including his portraits of Edith Sitwell (1935), TS Eliot (1938), and (1949) Ezra Pound (1938).

During the Second World War , Wyndham Lewis lived first in the United States and then in Canada, where he again became an official war painter. In 1945 he returned to England. Health problems and eventually a tumor caused him to go completely blind in 1951. In 1950 his autobiography Rude Assignment was published . He was in the Golders Green Crematorium in London cremated , where his ashes is located.

Literary and critical works

The first edition of Blast , June 1914
  • Blast , 1914/1915
  • Tarr , 1918 (German Tarr , 1990)
  • The Caliph's Design , 1919
  • The Art of Being Ruled , 1926 (German: The Art of Being Ruled , 2004)
  • Time and Western Man , 1927
  • The Wild Body A Soldier Of Humor And Other Stories . Publisher: Harcourt, Brace And Company, New York 1928
  • Paleface , 1929
  • The Lion and the Fox , 1927
  • The Childermass , 1928
  • The Apes of God , 1930
  • Hitler , 1931 (German Hitler and his work in English lighting , 1932)
  • Snooty Baronet , 1932
  • Men Without Art , 1934
  • Left Wings Over Europe Or How To Make A War About Nothing , 1936
  • The Revenge for Love , 1937 (German Revenge for Love , 1938)
  • Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! , 1937
  • Blasting and Bombardiering , 1937
  • The Mysterious Mr. Bull , 1938 (German: The mysterious John Bull , 1939)
  • The Jews: Are They Human? , 1939
  • The Vulgar Streak , 1941
  • Anglo-Saxony: A League That Works , 1941
  • AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN . Published by Doubleday and Company 1949
  • Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-to-date , 1950
  • Rotting Hill , 1951
  • The Writer and the Absolute , 1952
  • Self-Condemned , 1954
  • The Demon of Progress in the Arts , 1954
  • Monstre Gai , 1955
  • Malign Fiesta , 1955
  • The Red Priest , 1956

exhibition

  • 2010: Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) , Fundación Juan March, Madrid

literature

  • Paul Edwards: Wyndham Lewis, Painter and Writer , 2000, New Haven and London
  • Fundación Juan March, Madrid: Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) , 2010 Spanish: ISBN 978-84-7075-575-0 ; English ISBN 978-84-7075-577-4
  • Andrzej Gasiorek: Wyndham Lewis and Modernism , 2004, London
  • Bradford Morrow: Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis , 1978, Santa Barbara
  • Lewis Normand: Wyndham Lewis the artist , London 1992
  • Paul O'Keeffe: Some Sort of Genius: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis , 2000, London
  • John Carey: Hatred of the masses. Intellectuals 1880-1939. Göttingen 1996, pp. 221–260 (Wyndham Lewis and Hitler)

Web links

Commons : Wyndham Lewis  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Wyndham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lewis, Percy Wyndham (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH at sea off Nova Scotia
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1957
Place of death London