The Caliph's Design

Résumé : Wyndham Lewis has been called the most neglected great British artist, but Lewis’s art criticism has been even more neglected than his own art. In this series of succinct, barbed essays, first published in 1919 and long out of print, he mounts an energetic defense of modern art — and attacks those distortions of it perpetrated by what he calls “art parasites.” Ever the enemy of dilettantism, Lewis separates true creativity from fakery. Witty demolitions of the English aesthetes, Roger Fry and the Omega workshop, are his main order of business; he also dismisses most faux-Naif paintings as “the infantile swank of the deformed,” and mocks the Futurist artist, who behaves “like a religious fanatic about a sausage machine or a locomotive.” Cézanne, the “lonely source” of what Lewis admires in modern art, has been sadly superseded, in his view, by eclectic “performers,” Picasso-imitators who change styles like overcoats.