Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2005-6: Word & Image
Document Type
Presentation
Date of this Version
April 2006
Abstract
Wyndham Lewis is a much-ignored Canadian born British artist who alongside Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce (all of whom he was friends with at various points in his life) helped form what we now call English High Modernism. Along with Ezra Pound in 1914, he founded the only avant-garde English art movement: Vorticism. Lewis was in his early thirties by that time, and had already joined and left the Bloomsbury Group. Although Vorticism is Lewis's creation that gets him the most attention, his work defies classification: the list of his writings contains literature, philosophy, sociology, political science, journalism, short stories, art critiques, two autobiographies, travel essays, drama, and poetry, and he edited numerous journals, while he painted dozens upon dozens of paintings and drew feverishly before he went blind in the early 1950s. His visual style in his paintings ranges from 'normal' representational portraits, to cubist, futurist, Vorticist, and various non-representational styles.
Date Posted: 31 July 2007
Comments
2005-2006 Penn Humanities Forum on Word & Image, Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellows.
URL: http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/05-06/mellon_uhf.shtml