The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where Is Your Vortex?

by P. Wyndham Lewis

Essays discuss modern art, the political aspects of art, architecture, futurism, French realism, Cezanne, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, and Raphael.

Genres: Art

183 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[Will]

"So when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would benefit by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks, the queer wild men of cubes, the terrible futurists, or any other rubbish the Yellow Press invents to amuse the nerves of its readers... It naturally does not please me, or any other painter who paints pictures that appear extravagant according to the pretty and facetious standard of this time, to be described as a wild man, or a bolshevik in paint. No pleasurable thrill accompanies these words when used about one's own very normal proceedings, since they appear to the painter the only normal proceedings in the midst of the detestable capers of the usual mild lunatic asylum we have to inhabit."

[charles]

ultimately, vorticism appears to me as a reactive movement - despite lewis' vocal scorn of 'fashionable' aesthetes and what he perceives as strands of primitivism or nostalgic revival. lewis insists that artists are the products of their physical and social environments - even the most original artists' talents are located within the intellectual and artistic climate of their time, though it may lead them down their own trajectories. he attempts a kind of compromise: a strong artistic personality expresses something vital and forward-looking about their time, and about the objects around themselves that synthesise themselves as sufficient forms qua human apprehension/interpretation - this in turn lends itself to a transformative attitude to the forms of life, as opposed to a mere fixation with the ontic aesthetic qualities of objects. where lewis falters is in his attempt to relate the creation of art to the life-world: he praises the specialised sense of the artist unbounded by trends, movements, fashions etc, as the historically necessary expression of an era; at the same time he derides the dandyish self-preoccupation of 'naive' art, novelty loves and so on - the lines between indulgent novelty and serious originality, between repartee and irony, are never seriously drawn outside a loose scaffolding of contempt. one gets the impression he just really wanted to vindicate his iconoclastic personal tastes. i do sympathise to some extent. the bourgeoisie are so good at apeing and scrambling the various codes of taste that it's hard to hate sophistically. but i reckon you could still do better than this.

[Joyce]

Wyndy can't string a consistent argument together across an entire book to save his life, but the engine that powers his work is precisely the contradictions which strike against each other sentence by thrilling sentence, like flint and steel

[oswald]

The architect and his lack of a vortex serves as a pretext for Lewis to deplore the lack of will and vision among his contemporary painters and critics.