Wyndham Lewis - The demon of progress in the arts

by Wyndham Lewis

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1955. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

PAGE

introduction 1

part ihow the arts differ in their extremism 11

I Music less Extreme than Fine Arts 13

II A Brake on Musical Extremism 16

III What it Costs to have Music 18

IV The Irresponsible Freedom of the Visual Artist 20 V The Cause of the Heterogeneity in the Fine Arts

in Our Time 21

VI Amateur Artists 26 VII Those who are Accessible to an Extremist

Glamour 28

VIII There is a Limit, beyond which there is Nothing 30

IX The Ability to See the Limit 34

X 'The Unknown Political Prisoner' and After 36

XI The 'Progressive' Slave 40

part iithe painting animal and the pundit 41

XII The Painting Animal 43

XIII The Pundit-Prophet 47

XIV When the Painter is least Free 51

XV The English Way 53

XVI The American Way 55

v

part iiithe part of vanity XVII Flattery of the Artist XVIII Today the Contemporary = the Extreme XIX The Glamour of the Extreme

part iverrors of malraux

XX 'A Compact Exclusive Clan*

XXI The Coming of non-Humanistic Art

XXII Superficiality of Cultures

XXIII The Diabolical Principle

part vconclusion

postscript

I

E XTREMISM is not easy to define or to describe. It is a disease like foot and mouth disease, which disastrously visits, not cattle, but artists. It is a disease which appeared, for the first time, among European artists, not more than fifty years ago. The kinds of artist among which the symptoms were most easily identified were the painter and the sculptor. It is not, however, a virus to which the visual artist, and no other, is susceptible. It was an accident that it was among them that it first manifested itself. The first case to be reported in these islands was mine, around 1913. You may imagine the sensation createdit was like the first Colorado beetle to be spotted in our rich brown fields, clinically free of odious sub-tropical pests.

Fortunately, with me the disease did not have time to mature. Another scourge, namely war, intervened. While, in one way and another, suffering from this martial pestilence I began to think a little. I recognized that, prior to the war, I had been visited by a complaint of a most unusual kind. I saw that it was irrational to attempt to transmute the art of painting into musicto substitute for the most naturally concrete of the arts the most inevitably abstract. So of course I recovered my reason. This did not mean that I abandoned a twentieth-century way of seeing. I escapedthat was all from reaching a point, very soon, where I should have ceased to be a visual artist at all. For what I was headed for, obviously, was to fly away from the world of men, of pigs, of chickens and alligators, and to go to live in the unwatered moon, only a moon sawed up into square blocks, in the most alarming way. What an escape I had!

But to take up the question of this disease again: its identification is not always by any means easy, which is one of the most dangerous things about it. It is difficult not to mistake it for something else. It has nothing whatever to do with art, but it resembles so closely one of the most common conditions experienced by artists.

There are, indeed, several intellectual excesses in no way pathologicstrainings towards the untried, which must have existed in paleolithic times as much as in our own. For extremism , this deadly disease about which I am writing, very closely resembles, at first sight, and to the untutored eye, that healthy originality by which an artist is properly exhilarated when he notices itthat sort of 'deep and honourable difference which marks out a Franz Hals, a Magnasco, a Goya, among all his fellowswhich is a hallmark as real as a birthmark; and which is the only advantage over others which is worth having.

I hope you will believe me when I say that I am quite sure that the English school making its appearance during World War Two, and just after, is actually the finest group of painters and sculptors which England has ever known. I do not refer to achievement; I refer to the existence of so many people who understand painting, and who have revealed a high order of attainment. The Pre-Raphaelites (the only other comparable collection of artists) were parochial by comparison; this group is European.

Let me name a few: Ayrton, Bacon, Colquhoun, Craxton, Minton, Moore, Passmore, Richards, Sutherland, Trevelyan.1 Except Henry Moore the sculptor, and Graham Sutherland (though older, an integral part of this school), all of these are still young enough for me to be able to say perhaps the maximum effort has not been put forth: so let me only speak of the quality of which there has been unmistakable evidence in all of these painters. A combination of the Musee Sans Murs and of the Golden Arrow, which so quickly wafts one to Paris, has made all these artists as good as Paris-trained. This may

There are others, but I select those with whose work I am very familiar because of my 'Round the Galleries' articles in The Listener.

account for a quality which is as mature and well-equipped as if this were a band of Bretons rather than merely Britons. In looking back upon my weekly tour of the shows at the time of my Listener articles, hundreds of canvases are crowded together in my memory, from each of which I received authentic delight, which only a work of the first order is capable of producing. I remember with what enchantment I came upon a group of paintings by Trevelyan at the Galleries of Gimpel Fils, for I was not very familiar with his work; Ceri Richards' pianoforte pieces; Craxton's tank for bathing at the foot of a steep hotel; Ayrton's superb portrait of William Walton composing, the striations of the figure rhythmically associated with the vertically striated cliffa portrait which should find its place in the National Portrait Gallery; a Colquhoun portrait, of a splendid density, in the hall of the late D. Macdonald's flat, which is still vividly present to me; the water-colour vegetation of the grandest quality, a small thing by Minton; Passmore (now in great danger), a snow-lighted Thames expanse, a glittering vibration, an invention of the first order; the bitter verdure of the gallows-tree, in preparation for a Crucifixion, by Sutherland.

Now, for the average gallery-goer, each and all of these painters is an extremistan authentic extremist. In a sense, of course, they are; but not in any way the kind of extremist I am talking about in this book. None of them is touched, even, by that contagion that hurries an artist to zero and to the death of talent. And here is where the gallery-gazer has to sharpen his wits and see the gulf that lies between painters of this sort, and those who are passing over into the rocky path upon the edge of the abyssthat ultimate advance-of-all-advances, where there is no more advance because there is nothing.

When I consider this gifted mass, not one but a dozen superb image-makers, capable of almost anything, I shudder at the thought of that withering disease which might at any moment attack them (the pictures of one are already turning to wood, but he is a man of heroic mould, and I believe that he will, one day, set fire to his carpentry). But an apocalypse takes shape in my anxious mind. I see with horror Francis Bacon's elephants being stricken with extremism, grown ashen and transparent, their trunks drooping, and falling in a heap of white ashes at the foot of their canvas, livid and vast and blank. That is not all. Mildly monumental, grandly sculpted, I perceive, aghast, some work of Moore's, as beautifully defined as a thundercloud, suddenly dissolving into an absurd abstraction, until at last there is nothing left of it but a phantom sausage, convulsed and withering into a white headless worm, a beginning of nothing. Everywhere the beginnings of nothing. I see the noble form of a Pompeii of Minton's silted up with the volcanic void, the concrete nothingness that comes from the fires beneath the crust. How terrifyingly destructive! I could behold with more equanimity an apocalypse of hops, a blank desuetude ensuing from the consumption of that British national drink closely resembling urine. I could be an unmoved witness perhaps, of this generation, blossoming in many images, dissolving in a dull orgy of British beer. Perhaps I could stolidly observe this brood of brilliant painters stricken with a black vomiting which I recognized as the plague. I have experienced so much that is exceptionally tragic that, were they all gathered in the Festival Hall, by some mischance, to listen to a new symphony by Mr. Britten, and should the hall be struck, and set on fire by a meteorite, and should they all perish in the flames, I should be horrified, but I should see that God did not mean England to have painters, and I would accept this, perhaps, as another example of those actions of the divinity which we find it impossible to comprehend.