Shifting truths
Andrew Lambirth
Wyndham Lewis Portraits National Portrait Gallery, until 19 October Supported by Christie’s
Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top art world award, and yet it receives very little publicity. Deserving past winners have included Robert Medley, John Hoyland and R.B. Kitaj, but this year it has gone to Jeff Koons. In my review of the summer show I pointed out that Koons should not be taking up space which could be more profitably used by others. This multimillionaire American was invited to exhibit at the RA (he’s not even an Honorary Academician), and has now been given the Wollaston Award, which is intended to celebrate the most distinguished exhibit in the Summer Exhibition. Koons’s high chromium stainless steel ‘Cracked Egg (Blue)’ is a pretty bauble, but hardly distinguished. The minuscule frisson caused by the deliberate banality of the idea clashing with its slick execution offers some slight justification for its existence, but really doesn’t merit serious artistic debate. Its presence in the Academy summer show highlights the divisive split between those obsessed with publicity and those who still wish to preserve the RA as a focus for artistic excellence. The publicityhunters seem to be winning. The Wollaston Award is in danger of becoming yet another art world farce, a meaningless rubber stamp for the fashionable and vacuous. Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was no stranger to controversy at the Academy. In 1938, he submitted one of his best portraits, the masterly half-length of T.S. Eliot, to the RA. The scarcely intrusive phallic scroll to the left of the background upset the socalled guardians of public morality, and the painting was swiftly rejected. Augustus John was so outraged he resigned from the Academy, and Lewis’s own contempt for the institution was resoundingly confirmed. Amazingly, the portrait could find no public or private purchaser in this country, so blinkered and timid were those with any money, and it was eventually sold to Durban Municipal Art Gallery in South Africa for £250. Consequently, it is only rarely seen in this country — to our continuing loss for it’s a magnificent painting.
It forms the centrepiece of this excellent tribute to Lewis’s very considerable powers as a portraitist. There are some 60 paintings and drawings on display, enough to give a good account of this superb draughtsman and (occasionally) good painter. Lewis was that rarity, an artist who was also a brilliant writer, and it seems likely that with his often precarious health he found it easier to write than to paint. Certainly he did not produce a huge body of paintings (the catalogue raisonné records just 127 oils), though he was a much more prolific draughtsman. In later years he expressed the wish that he’d painted more portraits, so he evidently valued the genre. And it can justly be said that he produced some very memorable paintings that are primarily depictions of individuals.
The visitor is greeted by the slightly menacing self-portrait ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro’ (1920–1), his teeth bared like a portcullis, his face long and angular as a hatchet. Lewis was a controversialist par excellence, the self-styled Enemy, a modernist of uncompromising views with an intellect to back them up. His incisive line is evident in a group of self-portrait drawings in the first room of the show, my favourite being the lowering ink and wash study from 1920 of our man in a big hat. He portrayed himself in different modes to show different sides of his personality, from the Cubist of 1911 to the nutty yokel of 1930, and then on to the sober businessman of 1932 and the slightly snide mocking figure with a pipe of 1938. He also painted himself as Raphael (1921), looking serene, quite a contrast to himself as the Enemy, at a combative angle to the world, economically rendered in ink and wash (1932).
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.
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