Tate Modern, London. A slew of books interpret his writings. Several biographies add to his two autobiographies. The profundity and variety of interpretations make any attempt to give a comprehensive picture of Lewis in a brief essay a herculean challenge.
Some attempts have been made to relate his paintings to his novels, but it is as an author that his reputation is recognized today,β that is, among the more serious class of reader. I expressed my admiration to the lecturer and he, learning that I was Canadian, told me that Lewis carried a Canadian passport. He lent me a book on Lewis for a couple of hours.
From it I discovered that Lewis not only authored novels, political, social and art criticisms but was a painter of note. He had formed the second art movement in British painting, Vorticism, in to , months before the first World War. Lewis was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia in and lived his first six years there with an English mother who painted landscapes whilst his American father wrote stories of his experiences as an officer in the Union Army in the US Civil War.
When his parents moved to England, to live on the Isle of Wight, Wyndham Lewis must have felt the strangeness of a very different culture, which became a challenge when his father eloped with the housemaid to the states, His mother moved with him to London and enrolled him as a boarder at Dr. Lewis, by his own account, was hopeless at sports and the dunce of his class, coming last in the years he was there. One of his masters caught him painting with easel and palette in his room and recognizing his talent helped him escape on a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London.
After two years there, owing to his indifference to the rules, he was expelled. Was his behaviour owing to his estrangement from the society in which he found himself when transported from Canada as a boy? Canadian passports identified the owner as British until the s and thus Canadians in Britain required no work permit, although the English regarded them as not-English.
