Books, Arts & Manners: The Standpoint of Genius

Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956, with introductions and notes By Walter Michel and C. J. Fox Funk & Wagnails, $10.00

Now listen. Gather round. A tip. Start saving your pennies. Put them in a jar labeled “Lewis.” If you start now, by next spring you will have the $35 it will take to buy Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings when that finally gets published, with eight hundred-odd reproductions and much text by Mr. Michel, and a great block of visual modernity will suddenly fit into a socket that has yawned for decades. Lewis has simply been missing from twentieth-century art history, no writer has been in a position to see more than random specimens of his work. And twentieth-century art history is no more intelligible without him than without Picasso. (No, I am not comparing him to Picasso.)

Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956, with introductions and notes By Walter Michel and C. J. Fox Funk & Wagnails, $10.00

Now listen. Gather round. A tip. Start saving your pennies. Put them in a jar labeled “Lewis.” If you start now, by next spring you will have the $35 it will take to buy Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings when that finally gets published, with eight hundred-odd reproductions and much text by Mr. Michel, and a great block of visual modernity will suddenly fit into a socket that has yawned for decades. Lewis has simply been missing from twentieth-century art history, no writer has been in a position to see more than random specimens of his work. And twentieth-century art history is no more intelligible without him than without Picasso. (No, I am not comparing him to Picasso.)