Great planes
Modernist poetry’s lanky luminary TS Eliot looks serious and far from comfortable in Wyndham Lewis’s famed portrait. His face is a jigsaw puzzle of shadowy half-moons and sharp planes. The hands droop from the oversized suit, suggesting the subtle creepiness of a limp handshake.
Where there’s smoke
It was not the vaguely skin-crawling, anxious qualities that the Royal Academy objected to when it notoriously rejected this portrait from its annual show in 1938. It was the abstract bits in the background, pluming menacingly like the bomb smoke of experimental ideas.
Rebel yell
A self-proclaimed rebel, Lewis knew the painting would be rejected. Before the first world war, his vorticist movement marked him as the premier radical artist. After the war, he failed to become the British Picasso, a fact he blamed on the culture at large.
Despicable me
History remembers Lewis as a woman-hating Hitler sympathiser. Yet his politics are inconsistent. His book, The Jews: Are They Human? for instance, was a satire against antisemites. What ties it all together is a contrarian passion to agitate. SS
Part of Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, to 1 January
.jpg?w=600)
