Lewis, Wyndham (1882?-1957), was a British artist and writer. In 1914, Lewis helped launch an experimental movement in painting called Vorticism, England’s first organized modern art movement. Vorticism celebrated action and the machine and attacked what the artists felt was sentimentality in British art of the time. Although it did not last long, Vorticism had an important influence on later artists in England.
Lewis’s many books include both fiction and nonfiction. His best-known novel is The Apes of God (1930), a satire on well-known public figures of the day. Tarr (1918), his first novel, is a comic story set in Paris before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Revenge for Love (1937) is a political satire. Self Condemned (1954) is partly autobiographical. Lewis also wrote a fantasy trilogy called the Human Age. It consists of The Childermass (1928) and Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955). His short stories were collected in The Wild Body (1927) and Rotting Hill (1951). Lewis’s nonfiction includes The Art of Being Ruled (1926), a work of political theory, and The Lion and the Fox (1926), a study of the English playwright William Shakespeare. Wyndham Lewis’s many critical essays were published in such collections as Men Without Art (1934) and The Writer and the Absolute (1952). Lewis wrote the autobiographies Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment (1950).
Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on November 18, probably in 1882 or 1884, on a yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia. He was educated at Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, and at the Slade School of Art, London. During World War II (1939-1945), he lived in the United States and Canada. Lewis died on March 7, 1957.
