Wyndham Lewis’ Figures
by
Michael Miller
(footnotes omitted)
If one shuffles through the illustrations in The Art of Wyndham Lewis, a survey of his artistic work published toward the end of Lewis’ life by Faber, the publisher of his literary work, as well as much of the major Modernist writing produced in England, one finds little exactly like Figures, which was selected by Evan Turner for the Museum in 1985. Lewis’ earlier "imaginative compositions," particularly his Vorticist work, his paintings and drawings of the 1914-1918 War, and his portraits predominate. It was only in 1971, when Walter Michel’s monograph appeared, that the true range of Lewis’ artistic work became generally known. The exhibition organized by the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1980 also brought many facets of his production into balance, and the two exhibitions at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery in London in 1983 and 1984 not only probed deeper into less-generally understood phases of his activity, but disseminated examples in public and private collections. There is a striking contrast between the complexity of his output as we know it today and the view of it presented by Faber in 1951. Typically, the introduction to this volume is accompanied by color reproductions of his self-portrait of 1921, the Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael, (Michel P 29) and his 1949 oil portrait of his friend, T. S. Eliot (Michel P 124), creating the impression of Lewis as a visual appendage of literary Modernism. While the chronological survey of Lewis’ career in the Faber book is in itself thorough and omits few, if any, of his major achievements, it fails to compensate for the simplified view presented by the publication as a whole, which is typical of the mid-century understanding of the Modernist movement.
Figures was painted in 1921, the same year as his famous Portrait of the Artist as Raphael, but its style and the nature of its message, are totally unlike it. Executed with a combination of India ink, bodycolor, and watercolor, over a graphite underdrawing on a "toothy" wove paper, the image may at first glance be read as an abstraction. The title, however, and the obvious ladder instruct the viewer to interpret the forms as human figures. This is readily apparent, as the eye perceives the representations of clothed body parts and articles of clothing. In a space defined by a floor and a wall and also occupied by two articles of furniture, probably two chairs, one pink and one blue, there are three figures. One of these, clearly male, is drawn almost entirely in monochrome. mostly with nervous hatchings of India ink, supplemented in places by buff and gray wash. The other person is clearly a woman, as suggested by the curved gynaecomorphic shape at its center and by the greater range of color in its clothing: blue, crimson, terra-cotta, tan, and pale green. The male figure appears constricted into a flattened cylinder of sharply edged angular patterns--a minimal phallus in a business suit, while the female figure appears to have climbed up the ladder onto the back of the other figure. Clearly the female figure dominates in the depicted encounter. This is expressed not only by her position in relation to the other, but by the expansive forms of her aggressive "head gear," which we must understand both as an article of clothing and as mental action, but in the aggressive, even fierce, form of the shapes that connote her eye and mouth, which is downturned in displeasure and marked by the steely, beveled edge of her blue-gray lower lip and jaw. The third figure, clinging directly to the back of the female figure, is a child, so denoted by the inchoate form of its skull and vertebrae. The wide-open, perfectly circular eye socket contrasts with the firmly directed semicircle of the woman’s eye and the eyeless, in fact, featureless face of the man. The "headgear" of the woman communicates the topic of their conversation. A pear-shaped echo of her torso is penetrated by a tower-like, phallic form. Above a drill-like extension of her spine there is the direct result of the coition, an ovoid shape either cut into by, or ingesting, a sharp red diamond. Below it a foetus-like form points to the figure of the child, which clings tightly to the terra-cotta, curvilinear female `shape, both as if it were the mother’s body and its own embryo. This imagery is consistent with other works of the same period, notably the more explicit Tyro Madonna (Michel 493) of the same year. In this context Figures could also be considered a Holy Family. The cigarette-like male below teeters dizzyingly on his ankles, while his tiny, neatly-laced shoes remain firmly planted on the ground. His strength lies in his density and rigidity. The zig-zag over his torso suggests simultaneously structural reinforcement and the pattern of a Harlequin costume. Lewis may well wish the onlooker to associate the image with traditional moralistic subjects, like Phyllis Riding on the Back of Aristotle or The Penance of St John Chrysostom. So much can be read from the image itself.
In Figures Lewis expressed his feelings about current events in his life. He had always had ambiguous feelings about women, although he was sexually strongly attracted to them and could boast of many conquests, some financially advantageous to himself. He felt that "‘surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for the artist,’ for it aroused his feeling and confused his intellect." His experience in the Great War matured him to the extent that he could tolerate an extended relationship with a women. He met Iris Barry, an aspiring poetess, through Ezra Pound in 1916. She was known for her striking dress and aggressive conversation. In Who’s Who she listed "talking" as her recreation. When she became pregnant in 1918, she apparently lived with Lewis in his flat, but was unacknowledged and usually told to retire to the kitchen when guests arrived. If Lewis disliked women and could accept them only for sex, his detestation of children was deeply ingrained in his psyche. He wrote:
"the reproductive act, the swallowing and evacuating process (self-preservation) are degrading, we look fools when we are at it...In his imagination, he reduced the entire company to creatures of this kind. A small dark wriggling monster. Then he knew that there was a piscine phase to the foetus... The sharp-sighted are apt to be granted this fundamental vision of the human, in the moments immediately succeeding procreation--the female adoration of the just-born abortion, striking a spark."
Throughout his life he never acknowledged or supported any of the children he had by his mistresses and refused to have children by his wife. The Cleveland drawing is an expression of just these thoughts.
Iris Barry bore his second child in 1921. When she returned to the flat from the hospital with the child, Lewis had locked her out, because he was having sex with Nancy Cunard, with whom he had been having an affair since the previous year. When they were finished, Iris and the newborn were allowed to enter. Barry and Lewis separated in April of that year.
At the same time Lewis opened an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, Tyros and Portraits, in which he showed two different aspects of his work. One was done "directly in contact with nature," but the rest was satire, "grotesque scenes of a family or race of beings that will serve to synthesise the main comic ideas that attack me at the moment." These tyros, as he called them, he defined by common usage: "an elementary person; an elemental, in short. Usually known in journalism as the Veriest Tyro. [All the Tyros we introduce you to are the Veriest Tyros.]"
In his Foreword to the exhibition catalogue, he wrote:
Unnecessary as it would appear to point out that these Tyros are not meant to be beautiful, that they are, of course, forbidding and harsh, there will, no doubt, be found people who will make this discovery with an exclamation of reproach...There are no abstract designs in this exhibition...The principle point of dispute is, I think, the question of subject-matter in a picture; the legitimacy of consciously conveying information to the onlooker other than that of the direct plastic message. Is the human aloofness and various other qualities, of which even the very tissue and shape of the plastic organisation is composed, in, say, a Chinese temple carving, to be regarded as compromising?
My standpoint is that it is only a graceful dilettantism that desires to convert painting into a parlour game, a very intellectual dressmaker’s hobby, or a wayward and slightly hysterical chess. Again, abstraction, or plastic music, is justified and at its best when its divorce from natural form or environment is complete, as in Kandinsky’s expressionism, or in the experiments of the 1914 Vorticists, rather than when its basis is still the French Impressionist dogma of the intimate scene. Prototypes of the people who affirm and flourish this new taboo of "pure art," which is not even pure, will, in twenty years’ time, be reacting obediently against it. Twenty years ago, "art for art’s sake" was the slogan of the ancestor of this type of individual. Our present great movement must be an emancipation towards a complete human expression; but it is always liable in England to degenerate into a cultivated and snobbish game.
My Tyros may help frighten away this local bogey....
These immense novices brandish their appetites in their faces, lay bare their teeth in a valedictory, inviting, or merely substantial laugh. A laugh, like a sneeze, exposes the real individual with an unexpectedness that is perhaps a little unreal. This sunny commotion of the face, at the gate of the organism, brings to the surface all the burrowing and interior broods which the individual may harbour. Understanding this so well, people hatch all their villainies in this seductive glow. Some of these Tyros are trying to furnish you with a moment of almost Mediterranean sultriness, in order, in this region of engaging warmth, to obtain some advantage over you.
But most of them are, by the skill of the artist, seen basking, themselves, in the sunshine of their own abominable nature.
At the same time, Lewis published the first issue of The Tyro, an eight page magazine "of the arts of painting, sculpture and design," which included three examples of these Swiftian Harlequin figures. If Lewis expected the exhibition or the magazine to launch a new artistic movement with himself in its van, he was mistaken. Only one more issue of The Tyro appeared.
Neither Figures nor the closely related Tyro Madonna was included in the exhibition. Both reflect a more complex level of expression than the strident tyros, which he clearly intended as the public face of his work at the time, embodied above all in his hideously grinning Mr. Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. (Michel P 27). While Figures retains the mordant wit of the tyros and some of their visual language, it is more abstract, and shows the elegant and complex design of his Abstract Composition (Michel 441) of 1921. While the tyros communicate by screaming, these other works of the period use a more urbane form of expression. Furthermore, its roots in his personal experience deny it the objectivity of his tyros and align it with sexually charged works like Tyro Madonna and The King and Queen in Bed (Michel 399: 1920)
Lewis’s remarkable versatility made him somewhat like a writer who could express himself in multiple languages and numerous genres. His creative volatility makes it almost impossible to comprehend his work in a coherent system of categories. Both his choice of an avenue of self-promotion in 1921, when he made Figures, and his beatification by Faber thirty years later, conceal much of the complexity and variety of his oeuvre.