Poet Painter; Writer's Block: The Darkness and the Black Shadows on the Skin of TS Eliot Suit the Poet's Mood of Blank-Eyed Introspection Writer's Block II: Above, Edith Sitwell, Poet, Historian, Writer in the Bloomsbury Tradition, Reduced to a Cypher in the Pseudo- Cubist Clutter of Her Study. below, an Early Self- Portrait of Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro

Byline: BRIAN SEWELL

Wyndham Lewis Portraits National Portrait Gallery

WYNDHAM Lewis is perhaps the least known important British painter of the earlier 20th century perhaps the least known of any century acknowledged by art historians, curators and cognoscenti, but to the general public obscure because obscured by these. We cognoscenti do not care for blasting revolutionaries in art; we are suspicious of the intellectual artist who obstreperously locks horns in argument with leaders whom we venerate as Lewis did with Roger Fry, that most fraudulent of frauds, and all other Bloomsbury poseurs; and we like our painters to stay neatly in their pigeonholes and paint. With Lewis (1882-1957), throughout his life an outsider isolated at Rugby, expelled from the Slade, at 28 a pseudo-Cubist in London before even the Parisians quite knew what Cubism was (Picasso was then 29), the Vorticist and editor of Vorticism's manifesto, Blast we solved the problem by ignoring and excluding him, the cold shoulder and the road to Coventry our responses to his wayward intelligence.

He was, as well, his own worst enemy.

Painting was not enough for him and he was as much a writer, a theorist, a critic, novelist and poet, too; he was even a political commentator unwise enough to express sympathy with Hitler's early struggles (though this had evaporated by 1939) and to support the Fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War that was, for British intellectuals, our civil war, too. In all this he broke the British rule that a man should have only one ability, and if unfortunate enough to be endowed with more, must ensure …

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Publication information: Article title: Poet Painter; Writer's Block: The Darkness and the Black Shadows on the Skin of TS Eliot Suit the Poet's Mood of Blank-Eyed Introspection Writer's Block II: Above, Edith Sitwell, Poet, Historian, Writer in the Bloomsbury Tradition, Reduced to a Cypher in the Pseudo- Cubist Clutter of Her Study. below, an Early Self- Portrait of Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Evening Standard (London, England). Publication date: August 29, 2008. Page number: 41. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group.

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