It’s not just ‘the general public’ that sometimes finds
abstract or conceptual art to be the empty, meaningless work of opportunistic
charlatans; sometimes artists do too. While belonging firmly to the European
avant-garde of his time, artist, poet and novelist Percy Wyndham Lewis
(1882-1957) created a series of figurative works – the Tyros – which stand
outside of, and satirise the modernist movement. While the satire of modernism
was not new in Lewis’ art, the ‘Tyronic’ works of the 1920s mark the beginning
of a wider programme (which included his relatively commercial portraiture of
the period) which attempted not just to draw attention to the stagnation and
decay which the artist perceived in post-WWI European culture, but also to put
forward (somewhat half-heartedly) the aim of a new and rigorous ‘classical’
regeneration of both art and society. In the aftermath of the war, Lewis saw an
opportunity to start afresh in an age in which artists were ‘creatures of a new
state of human life.’[1]
With the
Tyros, he devoted himself to addressing, in his characteristically humorous and
aggressive fashion, what he saw as lingering aspects of the old world, in
particular the decadent ‘90s of Oscar Wilde & co and the limp
quasi-modernism of the Bloomsbury group. However, much of the underlying philosophy
of Lewis’ ‘new’ direction derives from the works – both literary and artistic –
of his earliest, pre-war maturity. The implications of this philosophy run far
deeper than simply a criticism of the artistic milieu of 1920s Britain,
addressing the very nature of humankind itself, with entirely negative
conclusions. Indeed, Lewis’ vehement opposition to the apparently progressive
movements of his time has often led to a shallow (although understandable)
denigration of the artist as a fascist. After an initial flirtation with the
far-right, though, he was eventually to dismiss the simple-minded politics of
fascism with exactly the same kind of aggressive amusement as he dismissed
almost everything else. Much of the power of the ‘Tyronic’ works derives from
the tension between the relatively positive aims of Lewis’ programme of
regeneration and the basic negativity of his satire. This tragic, even
hopeless, view of humankind is integral to the satire of the Tyros as it lay at
the very heart of Lewis’ conception of humour.
The figures of the Tyros, with their naive, childlike
responses to life are, at first glance, not entirely new in Wyndham Lewis’s
art. The theme of the human being as an instinctively motivated animal is a
feature of both his art and writing from his earliest maturity. The Breton
peasants of the Wild Body stories of
1909-17, crude and animalistic, have recognisable features in common with the
Tyros. Artistically too, the subjects of his drawings, such as Dieppe Fisherman (1910) and Courtship (1912), share with the Tyros
the signs of an intuitive, animal nature such as low foreheads, ridiculous
postures and a general lack of individuality. His satire has more than one
target – though the fisherman and the romantically engaged couple are, to
Lewis, comical figures, they are merely representative samples of wider
humanity; ‘’men’ are undoubtedly, to a greater or lesser extent, machines...
Men are sometimes so palpably machines, their machination is so transparent,
that they are comic.’[2] This
point of view remained constant in Lewis’s philosophical worldview, but the
Tyros nonetheless differ significantly from his earlier work.
Courtship (1912)
The First World War had an enormous impact on the generation
who lived through it, Lewis included, as well as on that which came after.
Before the war, Lewis was a public figure – the outspoken leader of the UK’s
own avant-garde art movement, the Vorticists. This celebrity was not to survive
the war, and neither was the public enthusiasm for (or at least amusement with)
the modern art which had created it. Whereas in 1914/15, Lewis’s work had
approached complete abstraction, he now found the hard-won achievements of the
Vorticist period ‘bleak and empty. They [the abstract geometric forms] wanted filling.’[3] The Tyros and Portraits exhibition was
Lewis’s first major attempt at fulfilling this goal. With these works he
attempted to address the problems with modern art – its lack of contact with or
interest in real life, its obsession with the fleeting and transient and its
preoccupation with the intuitive and sensual (exemplified slightly later by Ben
Nicholson and Kit Wood’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘naive’ painter Alfred Wallis)
which, to Lewis, democratised and undermined the skilled, privileged role of
the artist, whose role as documenters (and even creators) of culture and
guardians of the intellectual heritage of humankind entailed a sense of
responsibility which he felt was being betrayed by the artistic elite of his
time. Therefore, the satire of the Tyros is intensified by a moral element
which had not been present in his sneering depiction of humanity in the pre-war
period.
Lewis’s complaints about Bloomsbury were not entirely
without foundation. Roger Fry and Clive Bell were, to the art world in France
and elsewhere, the face of the
English avant-garde, but they failed to use what little influence they had to
promote English art outside of their own somewhat cosy coterie – indeed, even
artists broadly in sympathy with their aims and methods, such as Ben Nicholson,
did not receive the kind of support they could perhaps have expected. Similarly,
Lewis’s claim that Fry, Bell and Duncan Grant were dilettantes (and therefore
related to the novice status of the Tyros), ‘playing’ at art without any
intellectual seriousness is not entirely
without foundation. Even the relatively grander theories of the group (such as
‘significant form’) seem, in practical execution, to correspond with Lewis’s
picture of ‘colour-matching, matchbox-making, dressmaking,
chair-painting...tinkerers.’[5] Comments
such as Fry’s ‘After all, there is only one art; all the arts are the same’[6] or even
worse, Clive Bell’s crass use of a sporting metaphor to grade the differing
qualities of French versus English artists (‘the English is normally a stone
below the French’[7])
strengthen the validity of Lewis’s claims.
The vision of the amateurish, pseudo-intellectual,
self-consciously ‘artistic’ figure of the Bloomsbury artist lent itself easily
to the grinning, elemental figures of the Tyros. Probably the most powerful
work on display in the Tyros and
Portraits exhibition was the large (165.1 x 88.9cm) oil painting, A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) of c. 1920.
A Reading of Ovid
This painting, acknowledged by Lewis as one of his most carefully finished
works, shows two Tyros disturbed in the act of reading. The humour of the
satire derives from the juxtaposition of the vacantly grinning masklike faces
of the two figures with the intellectual pastime they are engaged in. This
corresponds with Lewis’s theory of the comic in general; ‘in one sense you
ought to be just as much surprised at finding a man occupied in this way
[reading] as if you had found an orchid or a cabbage... The movement or
intelligent behaviour of matter – any autonomous movement of matter, is
essentially comic.’[8]
At the same time, the satire is more pointed and direct – these ridiculous
figures are, as Lewis explained, an attempt to ‘frighten away the bogey of art
for art’s sake’, the basis for the ‘cultivated and snobbish game’ of English
art,[9] art
which had no root in culture or society, but was an activity driven only by the
whim of the artist. This satire is especially barbed when one takes into
account Lewis’s elevated view of the artist as a cultural leader – and whatever
his evaluation of Roger Fry’s talent, Lewis did accept that he was a ‘sensitive
and real being’ outside of the homogenous and unthinking mass of the general
public. He might therefore be expected to feel the sting of the satire keenly.
If the foreword to the exhibition catalogue was not specific enough, the
clothing of the Tyros in A Reading of
Ovid; the baggy suits and the foppish, ostentatious handkerchief,
identifies them clearly as the dilettante artists described in Lewis’s 1918
novel, Tarr; ‘the art-touch, the Bloomsbury technique, was very noticeable. Hobson’s
tweeds were shabby, from beneath his dejected jacket emerged a pendant seat,
his massive shoes were hooded by the superfluous inches of his trousers: a
hat... shaded unnecessarily his countenance.’[10]
In contrast to the directness of his visual attack on
Bloomsbury, the use of Ovid as the text over which the Tyros grin, leaves the
scene open to several interpretations. This may in itself be a joke on Lewis’s
part; the author of the Metamorphoses
being evoked in a picture which shows primitive ‘elementals’ attempting to
transform themselves by aping the manners of his intellectual superiors. It is
also possible that Ovid was chosen as the classical author best known for his
erotic works, such as The Art of Love
and that the Tyros are simply shown sniggering over the ‘dirty bits’ of one of
the world’s great authors, as befits their base, sensual outlook. Yet another
interpretation, with wider-reaching conclusions, is that the use of Ovid refers
to the ‘return to stability’ within the French avant-garde of the post-war period,
a neo-classical revival looking back to Ingres and David. Lewis, with his own
leanings towards a new classicism,
was scornful of this fad, which he saw as a French retreat into a safe,
patriotic ‘mother-tradition’.[11] In this
reading of the painting, the pseudo-intellectual Tyros are engaged in a futile
attempt to build a new thought-world, entirely grounded in the past. Lastly, it
is possible that the use of Ovid as a figure beyond the reach and understanding
of the childlike Tyro is a piece of somewhat arrogant self-identification.
Ovid, like Lewis, was an outsider figure, both in his own time and in
subsequent literary history, and had been excluded from the elite of his own
day for the subversive and satirical nature of his art.[12] The
arrogance suggested by this interpretation is not at all inconceivable when
looked at in the context of Lewis’s artistic programme of this period – his
criticism of Fry in particular seems to suggest that a more suitable figurehead
for English modernism would be a professional artist and genuine intellectual –
i.e. Lewis himself.
Whatever his pretensions, A Reading of Ovid presents vivid evidence of Lewis’s outsider
status in the context of European modernism. As a painting, it has little
parallel in Europe at that time. The figures, though influenced by cubist ‘primitivism’ in
their hard-edged, geometric, non-naturalistic outlines, bear little resemblance
to extant cubist art. Likewise, although effective satire was being produced by
Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and (most notably) by the German Expressionist
George Grosz, their art has little in common with Lewis’s bizarre vision. Nor
do these artists share the scope of Lewis’s aims, balancing artistic, social
and philosophical concerns, making the Tyro paintings, as he explained, ‘at
once satires, pictures and stories.’[13] Lewis,
devoted to the cause of ‘art’ in a way that was anathema to the Dadaists,
totally eschewed the iconoclastic playfulness of Picabia and Duchamp. The power
of Grosz’s art often derives from the passionate rendering of the artist’s
bitterness and disgust with the decay and corruption of post-war Germany, where
the economic, social and political situation was far more unstable and extreme
than in France or England.
Grosz, The Pillars of Society
Lewis’s view of satire did not intend to have the
emotional impact of work such as Grosz’s; he declared that ‘satire is cold... the non-human outlook must be
there.’[14] It is
this coldness that allows the intellectual response that Lewis desired in the
viewer. The only real parallels for A
Reading of Ovid are in fact in the earlier works of Lewis himself. The
effective, non-naturalistic colour scheme of opposed visceral reds and deep metallic
blues had been a feature of his art since his earliest, Futurist-inspired
works. This colour scheme is the opposite of the warm, harmonious,
Matisse-influenced and decorative style of the Bloomsbury painters, and so fulfils
the dual function of preventing a sensual response (thereby inviting an
intellectual one) and providing a corrective example to contemporary Bloomsbury
practice. The composition has a tense vitality which is achieved in a similar
way to that of his pre-war abstract works such as Composition (1913). This energy comes not from loose, free,
energetic brushwork, but from the way in which the dynamic and surging forms of
the Tyros, as with those of the abstract works, are locked into a tense design
by firm, clean outlines. The power of the line imprisons the energy of the
composition, creating an image which is static, but bursting with potential
movement. The vitality is, in the Tyros, not merely abstract ‘design’, but also
an integral part of the subject.
Composition (1913)
The energy of the Tyros was stressed in Lewis’s writings,
and expressed in their grotesque laughing faces. Laughter, to Lewis, was an
important philosophical concept. The ‘wild body’ of the human animal, said
Lewis, ‘triumphs in its laughter. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive,
hard and unchangeable.’[15] The
world this laughter reveals is that of the human animal in its true element. In
issue two of his magazine The Tyro,
Lewis included a ‘Tyronic dialogue’, in which ‘X’, a Tyro representing Lewis
himself, makes the following assertion to his more naive companion – ‘Every
civilised milieu is... the devouring jungle driven underground, the instinct of
bloody combat restricted to forensic weapons.’[16] This
underlying reality, masking complex human behaviour is also hinted at in
smaller works, such as the Tyro Madonna
(1921) where religion and sexuality are combined in a totem-like image which
seems to satirise the edifices built upon the baser instincts of mankind. Laughter
brings this subterranean Darwinian world to the surface – and satire, though a
form of criticism, aims partly to provoke an amused response in the viewer. This laughter is, like all laughter,
the tragic reminder of the inescapable fate of the human being – to live and
therefore to die as an animal like any other. We are laughing with the Tyros as
well as at them.
Tyro Madonna
The use of satire, had then, despite its appeal for Lewis ,
negative connotations. In appealing to the sense of humour, it is the denial of
the classicism which he had put forward in his portraits as the basis of a new
modern art, and in fact the denial of all meaningful progress. Although he
attacked the situation of the arts in England vigorously, privately he declared
that ‘it would be unwise to regard [this state of affairs] as anything but
permanent.’[17]
The truth of this remark must have seemed self-evident in the irony that A Reading of Ovid was purchased by one
of the leading members of the late-Victorian dilettante class, Osbert Sitwell,
himself a butt of Lewis’s satire. Whatever his hopes for the future of art and
society, Lewis had, fundamentally, a pessimistic view of humankind. This
pessimism, a feature of Lewis’s thought since his early maturity and sharpened
by the influence of T.E. Hulme, had been, not surprisingly, deepened by the
events of the First World War. The art historian David Peters Corbett claims
that Lewis was too ‘satirical’ to show his mourning in his art[18] but in
fact, the Tyros themselves, in their elemental stupidity, can themselves be
interpreted as a bleak kind of mourning for the pointlessness of the mass
slaughter of 1914-18.
The Tyros, vessels for the raw energy and vitality of the
human animal, necessarily display none of the stillness and ‘deadness’ which
Lewis saw as essential to the creation of an ‘immortal’ classical art, and by
their very theme, deny the truth of such an art. However, classicism’s loss is
satire’s gain, as the concentration on the eternal truth of the real nature of
civilisation paradoxically gives the Tyros a timelessness that transcends the immediate
situation they satirise, making them of more than socio-historical interest.
The wide-ranging satire and deep pessimism of Lewis’s
outlook did not spare even the intellectual elite which he saw as the ideal
leaders and creators of a new culture. The culmination of his ‘Tyronic’ period
is the one of the most extraordinary paintings of his career; the self portrait
Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920/1).
Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro
This painting shares many features with A
Reading of Ovid. The colour scheme has dramatic contrasts of dark and
light, creating a dramatic tension, again denying the comfortable sensual
response of most Bloomsbury art. The composition is jagged and stark,
containing great energy within tightly enclosed boundary lines. The Tyro bares
his teeth in a sneer, looking disdainfully past the viewer from under the
aggressive sweep of his hat. In contrast to the average Tyro his forehead is
high, but the facial expression (and the status as a Tyro) suggests animal
cunning rather than intelligence. While promoting the exhibition, Lewis stated
in an interview with the Daily Express that the vitality of the Tyro is ‘purposeless,
and hence sometimes malignant’[19] and
this is the aspect we see here. The Tyro sneers at the viewer, revealing the
basic, negative instinct underlying Lewis’s complex criticism of art and
society. Given that Lewis had repeatedly stated his views on the ultimate
tragedy of human life, the ‘terrible nature of its true destiny’[20] as
revealed by Darwin, it is not inconceivable that the self-portrait depicts
Lewis’s real ‘animal self’, sneering at the somewhat romantic ideal of immortality
through art that the artist fostered through his intellectual ambitions. Given
the nihilism that formed the heart of Lewis’s worldview, the animal response,
the sneer or laugh of the Tyro, was the only
valid one when confronted by the essential joke of human consciousness.
Ultimately, the Tyros invite the audience to laugh with as well as at them; to
mock the ridiculousness of humankind and to sneer at its pretensions.
With the Tyros, Wyndham Lewis created a mythology based on
the essential transience of human life and the animal impulses which ultimately
guide all of our seemingly civilised pursuits. In the end, as the artist no
doubt predicted, the Tyros failed to accomplish much beyond consolidating Lewis’s
position as an antagonistic troublemaker in the art world of inter-war England.
In the build up to World War Two, Lewis isolated himself even further with some misjudged political writings, and pursued the pessimism of the Tyros on a
bigger, more generalised scale with powerfully negative works such as Two Beach Babies (1933) and Inferno
(1937). Post WW2 though, despite completing his massive, Dante-esque mythological trilogy of novels, The Human Age, he was never to regain either his power as an artist or his standing as a public figure.
[1]
Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Children of the New Epoch’ from The Tyro No.1 available to download at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/116015166093419.pdf
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