Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Archives for Art

Virginia Woolf – The Death of the Moth

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Death of the Moth - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth (1942) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US


The Hogarth Press
Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – The Waves

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Waves - first edition

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Customarily, Virginia Woolf composed in longhand, writing in ink with an old-fashioned straight pen on the right-hand page of a manuscript book bound for her by the press. She reworked each page as she went, writing for two hours or more in the mornings. In the afternoons she would type up the morning’s work, usually making only minor corrections or changes. When she had completed the first draft of the novel, represented by a holograph and a slightly edited typescript, she would then retype the book from the beginning, making whatever revisions she felt necessary, sometimes scrapping whole sections and rewriting them in markedly different ways. The final shaping of the book took place in this stage. The resulting typescript, probably bearing the marks of further revisions in ink, was given to Leonard for his critical reading.

After this, Virginia would sometimes, as she did with The Waves, have a press secretary retype the text into a copy which she corrected for errors before sending it to R. & R. Clark to be set and printed. At some point either after the proofs were corrected or after each book was published, Virginia would destroy her typescripts, saving only the holograph copy, probably feeling … that it best represented her initial creative impulses and so was important to keep as a record of her artistic struggles. The Waves, however, is unique among her novels because she completely rewrote it from scratch, starting over with a new holograph version and resulting typescript. The two existing holographs … total 399 and 347 pages respectively.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Literary studies, The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – The Years

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Years cover - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Leonard Woolf and many critics of the time considered The Years badly flawed in characterization and structure. Recent critics, however, mostly feminist, have opened up the novel in interesting ways, making virtues out of what were thought vices. Among other points, they have argued that The Years offers compelling evidence of Virginia Woolf’s courage and genius in confronting and remaking herself as a woman in a sexist world, in focusing her frustrations to expose traditional masculine myths of marriage and sex. Such criticism and the textual studies of her revisions have made the novel seem one of the more interesting and ambitious of Woolf’s books, its very ambiguities and muted anger part of its qualities. Leonard Woolf and the early male critics though it inferior to Virginia’s great modernist novels, but the average reader in 1937 had no such qualms, flocking to it with relief after the difficulties of The Waves.

In spite of his reservations about its literary virtues, Leonard anticipated its popularity and ordered over 18,000 copies of The Years for publication on March 15, 1937. Its commercial success completely overshadowed Virginia’s other novels. It sold over 13,000 copies in the first six months. In America, Harcourt Brace printed 10,000 copies for the first edition and quickly reprinted, as The Years sold over 30,000 copies in six months. It became an authentic American best-seller for 1937, ranking sixth on a list led by such heady company as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage and outranking John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. One check alone from Harcourt Brace on January 5, 1938 total led over $5,000.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

In 1937 Virginia Woolf appeared on the cover of Time magazine: she had achieved a remarkable level of critical recognition and esteem that was now translated into more popular acclaim and fame. The initial print run of The Years was the largest of any of Woolf’s novels to that date. The focus of the novel is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists. Vanessa Bell’s jacket for the book features a rose surrounded by geometric patterns and is signed with her full name.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, The Years, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – Three Guineas

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Three Guineas - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This is the second of Virginia Woolf’s overtly feminist polemics. In it, she develops the ideas first put forward in A Room of One’s Own and launches an incisive critique of the English establishment – concentrating on its principal bases of power – the House of Lords, the military establishment, the Church, and the educational system.

“Virginia Woolf’s reading notebooks and scrapbooks [reveal] how much labour went into [her] gathering of facts: twelve volumes of notes, including three scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1937. In the power, anger, wit, and satire of her attack on repressive masculine institutions, Woolf chose not to write in the discourse of a traditional historian, sociologist, politician, suffragist, or guildswoman. She developed her arguments, cited her examples, digressed through provocative and unorthodox footnotes, to flail the misogyny and militarism of the patriarchal establishment with all the craft of the essayist and novelist. If she took little notice of the feminist history or the sociopolitical status of women in the 1930s as documented by Strachey and others, her book proved so welcome an offensive against enduring male sexist attitudes that her sisters in the trenches overlooked her lapses. They gleefully applauded her achievement.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Three Guineas considers women’s role in society, and more particularly, what they might do to prevent war.Woolf traces fascist elements within England’s education system and professions, highlighting monetary and material inequities of class and gender. She argues that “the public and the private worlds are insperably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other”.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

To the Lighthouse cover - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

What Good are the Arts?

June 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

The chapter titles of John Carey’s book on art theory make his sceptical position quite clear. ‘What is a work of art?’, ‘Is ‘high’ art superior?’, ‘Do the arts make us better?’, ‘Can art be a religion?’. He is taking a radical perspective on claims that are traditionally made for the appreciation of art. And his answers to those questions (in order) are – Art can be anything people claim it is – No, ‘high’ art is not necessarily superior – No, there is no evidence it makes us better – and Yes, unfortunately, art is sometimes seen as a form of religion. He asks challenging questions and raises points some readers might find quite difficult to take on board.

What Good are the ArtsFor instance, on the issue that the appreciation of art is capable of inducing feelings of transcendent ecstasy, he points out that such states of mind can be perceived as essentially complacent and selfish, since they are customarily associated with a feeling of harmony and oneness with the world. In a world where a huge part of its population is living in starvation and misery, this is hardly a desirable state of being and certainly not one which can claim to be ethically superior.

He manages some of his arguments by slightly devious means. For instance in attacking Kant’s absolutist values he claims that aesthetics were ‘invented’ in the eighteenth century – conveniently omitting Aristotle’s Poetics which he clearly knows about, because he mentions them in a later chapter.

It’s a very amusing read, because he takes an ironic and dismissive attitude to the snobs and the vainglorious commentators on art, including some celebrated figures whose bogus ideas he is debunking. Nobody is spared: lots of Big Names are dealt with by almost summary execution – Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer – all ‘essentialists’ who believed that great works of art had something unreachable and transcendent which lesser works did not. But they couldn’t ever prove it.

His assessment of the American art collector John Paul Getty is typical. Pointing out that Getty’s personal opinions included support for eugenic engineering and capital punishment, he observes:

Viewed as a humanising influence, the Getty art collection was admittedly a failure insofar as it affected its owner … There is little point in acquiring two Rembrandts and a Rubens if your social views remain indistinguishable from those of any saloon-bar fascist.

You’ll have to hold on to your intellectual hat when he gets round to extolling Adolf Hitler’s interest in painting , architecture, and music – but it’s only to argue that Western culture can easily co-exist with barbarity when it is elevated to a form of quasi-religious belief.

He does skip around somewhat between painting, literature, music, and other forms of traditional art – but ultimately nails his colours to the mast in the second half of the book when he defends literature. He does so on the grounds that unlike the other arts it is self-reflective. That is, it can criticise itself, and offer multiple moral perspectives. Indeed, it demands more of participants than the other arts, because it must be interpreted through the act of reading.

He even celebrates its indistinctiveness, which accounts for so many possible interpretations – which then come out and compete with each other for acceptance. All this is illustrated by close readings from novels and poetry straight from the traditional English Literature curriculum.

When it first came out, this book upset a lot of people with an interest in maintaining ‘essentialist’ positions. So he even indulges himself with a postscript in which he replies to all the reviewers who took offence – saving his most withering remarks for the likes of the self-aggrandising ‘religion of art’ supporter Jeanette Winterson.

It’s a very invigorating and entertaining read. And it’s likely to make most people think twice about the claims they make for the art they like. I hope he follows this up with a book on modern literary criticism.

© Roy Johnson 2005

What Good are the Arts?   Buy the book at Amazon UK

What Good are the Arts?   Buy the book at Amazon US


John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.296, ISBN 0571226035


More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: Art, Cultural history, English literature, John Carey, Theory, What Good are the Arts?

William Plomer – Sado

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Sado - first edition

 
William Plomer, Sado (1931) Cover design by John Armstrong.

“The first version of Sado ran to some 170,000 words, as Plomer wrote to Woolf in February, but he soon boiled it down to half that length. He sent the revised typescript to the Woolfs two months later just as they returned to London after driving through western France for two weeks on their annual outing. Refreshed from their trip, the Woolfs read Plomer’s novel immediately, Leonard writing to him five days later on Friday that both he and Virginia liked the book very much. They were struck by Plomer’s writing and his psychological insights, finding the theme [of homo-eroticism] “extraordinarily interesting” and his prose less uneven than his previous writing, with “fewer, if any, air pockets”. With the publication of Sado, Plomer reached maturity as a writer. Leonard had over 1,500 copies of the novel printed and issued with a handsomely stylized dust jacket in white and blue designed by John Armstrong. In spite of its promising send-off, Sado disappointed by selling only 837 copies in the first six months and by going in the red over £64 in the first year.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, Sado, William Plomer

Women, Marriage, and Art

July 15, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

Here’s a sample of recommended studies featuring women, marriage, and art. Women not as artists themselves so much as the wives, mistresses, and the muses who have inspired creation. Some have had the misfortune to partner with monsters of egoism, but others have been women brave enough to defy social norms and live successfully in an unconventional manner.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the WindThe Bride of the Wind   [full review]
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that’s her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying “I only marry geniuses”. He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn’t even go to his funeral.
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon US

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismMistress of Modernism   [full review]
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress – though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side’ of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov   [full review]
This is a fascinating biography of a woman who devoted the whole of her life to her husband’s literary production. Vera Slonim became Vladimir Nabokov’s secretary, his editor, proofreader, and literary agent, his driver, protector (she carried a revolver in her handbag) and sometimes she even delivered his lectures. She was just as imperious and aristocratic as he was, but gave herself up entirely to his ambitions. Nevertheless, after suspecting him of dalliance with a young American college girl, she took the precaution of attending all his classes to keep a watchful eye on him.
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon US

Among the Bohemians Among the Bohemians   [full review]
The early part of the twentieth century was a period that gave rise to bohemianism in British life. People (and women in particular) kicked off the social restraints that were still hanging round as a shabby residue of the Victorian era. Most of the female figures Virginia Nicholson deals with in this study were artists and writers: Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, painters Dora Carrington (who lived with two men) Nina Hamnet and the illustrator Kathleen Hale (who was secretary and lover to Augustus John) and the society Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had affairs with both her gardener and Bertrand Russell amongst others. These women took up smoking, wore jumble sale clothes, drank to excess, tried drugs, and refused to do any housework. Very politically incorrect role models – but fascinating characters.
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon US

Parallel Lives Parallel Lives   [full review]
This has become a classic study of four Victorian marriages. John Ruskin was an authority on art and beauty, but he is famous for never having consummated his marriage. What’s not so well known is that when his wife divorced him on these grounds, he offered to prove his virility in the courtroom. John Stuart Mill also had a marriage blanche – but on the principle that men ought to compensate women for the social injustices they suffered. George Eliot on the other hand defied conventions by living with a married man, then when he died married a man twenty years younger than herself. She meanwhile wrote some of the classics of nineteenth century English literature.
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US

Singled Out Singled Out   [full review]
By the time the first world war ended, more than three-quarters of a million young British servicemen had lost their lives. The single young women who had ‘kept the home fires burning’ and waited for them faced an alarming shortage of marriage prospects. And matrimony was the one escape from the shame of spinsterhood offered to women at that time. This searching original study by Virginia Nicolson (grand-daughter of the painter Vanessa Bell) tells the stories of women who were forced to invent careers for themselves. They became teachers, librarians, journalists, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo. Some sacrificed emotional ties to further their careers; others invented new forms of friendships and intimacy.
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon US

Uncommon ArrangementsUncommon Arrangements   [full review]
In an age where one third of marriages end in divorce, it’s refreshing to look at alternative arrangements some people have explored. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry all frioends with each other. Ottoline Morell helped her husband cope when he revealed to her that both his lovers were pregnant at the same time. Una Troubridge remained loyal as lesbian ‘wife’ to Radcliffe Hall (of The Well of Loneliness fame) whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year long affair with a young Russian girl. Troubridge however took economic revenge when she was made executrix to her ‘husband’s will. Katie Roiphe’s study of radical alternatives to conventional marriage in artistic circles includes a fair amount of emotional suffering and masochism – but it’s certainly thought provoking to see what lengths people will go to in enjoying a little sexual self-indulgence.
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


More on biography
More on literary studies
More on the arts


Filed Under: Biography, Lifestyle Tagged With: Alma Mahler, Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Literary studies, Modernism, Parallel Lives, Peggy Guggenheim, Vera Nabokov, Virginia Nicolson

Wyndham Lewis

May 7, 2018 by Roy Johnson

painter, novelist, critic, bohemian rebel

Wyndham Lewis was a controversial figure in English modernism between 1912 and 1954. He was both a graphic artist and a novelist, and he collaborated with some of the most influential creative figures of the period – the American poet Ezra Pound, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and the British painter Augustus John. He is credited as the co-inventor of Vorticism – the one native English movement in modern art.

Wyndham Lewis

portrait by Wyndham Lewis 1923

Lewis was born in 1882 in Amhurst, Nova Scotia to an American father and an English mother. His full name included ‘Percy’, but as an adult he tried to discourage its use. In 1888 the family moved to England and his parents separated. Percy was raised by his mother in Norwood, south London, whilst his father settled in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His father was a licentious and improvident character who lived on money supplied by an older brother.

Lewis was sent to boarding school in Bedford then to Rugby for two years where his academic record was poor. But he showed promise in painting and drawing. At sixteen he was enrolled at the Slade, where his drawing instructor was Henry Tonks, whose previous students included Augustus John.

Despite erratic attendance, Lewis did well and in 1900 won a two-year scholarship. However, he was expelled from the college after a year – for a combination of smoking and bad timekeeping. William Rothenstein introduced him to Augustus John, whom he henceforth regarded with a sort of hero-worship.

He moved into Fitzrovia, from where he made excursions to Spain and Holland, before settling in Paris. There he acquired his first mistress – a German woman Ida Vendel who was three years his senior. He now had two women who were supporting him financially – his mother and his lover.

There were plans to marry Ida, but he was subject to jealous rages when he discovered she had had lovers in her past. After a brief sojourn in Munich he returned to Paris, and although he spent most days in studios, he also had literary ambitions. There was a plan to write a series of sonnets. He spent a summer and Xmas holiday in the company of Augustus John and his family, but continued to cadge money from Ida and his mother, who even repaid his debts to other people.

Depressed by the failure of his relationship to Ida, he relapsed into a state of neurasthenia, which was then the fashionable term for unspecified maladies. To add to his woes he managed to contract gonorrhoea on a visit to Spain. In 1909 he made his literary debut in the English Review, alongside contributors such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell. He exhibited at the Grafton Group exhibition and participated at first in the Omega Workshops enterprise. But very quickly a series of disagreements and misunderstandings arose. Lewis reacted by producing libellous round robin denouncing Fry which put an end to the association.

He branched out into similar enterprises of his own. He collaborated with Richard Nevinson on designs for futurist tableaux vivants, and together with Ezra Pound and Cuthbert Hamilton established the Rebel Arts Centre. Lewis had a new suit made to emphasise his importance of his role as the Managing Director. The enterprise came to nothing.

Wyndham Lewis

His next venture was the magazine BLAST which was launched, appropriately enough, a few days before the start of the First World War. It was virtually the journal of the English Vorticist movement, for which Lewis wrote most of its largely incoherent manifesto. The magazine caused a minor sensation, then like so many other avant-garde publications of its type, it folded after the second issue.

In his private life Lewis was breaking away from Olive Johnson, who had just borne his second child. His daughter Betty and son Peter were both raised by Lewis’s mother.

In 1916 he tried very hard to find a cushy appointment in the army, but had to settle for being a bombardier. He was posted to the front line in northern France, and whilst in the thick of heavy fighting he amazingly continued to edit the proofs of his novel Tarr which was being serialised in Harriet Weaver’s magazine The Egoist.

The following year he was given compassionate leave when his mother became dangerously ill with pneumonia. He had his leave extended thanks to the intervention of Nancy Cunard and wangled his way into becoming an official war artist. After a brief affair with Sybil Hart-Davis whose husband was fighting as a captain at the front in France he took up with Iris Barry (real name Frieda Crump) who became mother to his third child Robin. The boy was raised by his maternal grandmother and didn’t know the identity of his parents until he became an adult.

Wyndham Lewis

Praxitella

A second child Mavis was put into a ‘Home for the Infants of Gentlepeople’. Iris Barry went on to become the first film critic for the Spectator and the cinematic curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is the subject of his magnificent portrait Praxitella. But Lewis left her behind in his wake as he became something of a celebrity portrait painter. He also had an affair with Nancy Cunard but separated from her because of her preference for anal sex.

A group of his friends subscribed to a fund which would provide a monthly income to stave off his chronic financial problems. His response was to complain and insult them, whilst continuing to accept the money. He sent one of them a peremptory postcard “WHERE’S THE FUCKING STIPEND? LEWIS”

He was engaged in producing what he called his One Great Book, provisionally entitled The Man of the World, which was in fact several separate works: a study of Shakespeare, a political work on social class, and studies of contemporary youth culture and homosexuality. Not surprisingly, nobody would publish it, and the ‘book’ was split up into several separate publications. In 1926 he released both Time and Western Man (philosophy) and The Wild Body (stories).

He worked hard at promoting himself in America in the mistaken belief that he would reach a wider audience. But the market value of his paintings was falling there. By the late 1920s his domestic situation matched his fairly chaotic private life. He had rooms in two separate houses in Bayswater, one an office, the other a library. A third establishment off Portobello Road was used for painting and was kept for him by his current mistress Gladys Hoskins.

Wyndham Lewis

portait of the artist as Tyro

In 1930 he published The Apes of God, a huge novel consisting of lampoon portraits of characters in the London art world, including all the people from whom he had borrowed money and turned into enemies. It caused a lot of complaints, to which he responded by publishing a follow-up book of self-justification. He also got married to Gladys and visited Berlin.

On the strength of a German visit lasting less than a month, he produced an enthusiastic ‘study’ of Hitler and National Socialism This work was later to tarnish his reputation when Hitler’s ‘methods’ became better known in Britain. But at the time Lewis was on the crest of a wave with several publishing contracts in hand.

He moved to new premises in St John’s Wood, with a pokey studio in Fitzrovia. He produced more books, one on ‘Youth-politics’ [a euphemism] which libelled Godfrey Winn and Alec Waugh. When his publishers were forced to withdraw the work, he produced another on exactly the same subject with a different publisher. This did nothing to stem the tide of legal and financial claims made against him, largely for unpaid debts – including from his own solicitors.

His main financial problems were caused by demanding advance payment for books and paintings which he then failed to produce. His health suffered because of the lingering side effects of his gonorrhoea. And he brought more trouble on himself by writing libellous fictions and critical attacks on fellow artists

He had further difficulties placing his written work caused by the censorship imposed by the two influential circulating libraries – W.H. Smith and Boots the chemist. His novel The Roaring Quean attacking the Bloomsbury group was deemed unpublishable by Jonathan Cape’s lawyers.

His support for Oswald Mosley and Franco in Spain made sure he remained firmly against the tide of popular liberal opinion. Yet when his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1937 did not attract much attention, Stephen Spender managed to gather the names of twenty (mainly leftist) artists for a letter of support in The Times.

However, his now-famous portrait of T.S. Eliot was rejected by the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition, which caused a short-lived controversy and the resignation of Augustus John as an academician.

But he did not endear himself to many people (except the Blackshirts) by publishing a book with the ridiculously provocative title of The Jews Are They Human? Whatever his political views, he left no time in sailing out of England on September 1, 1939 and emigrating to Canada – the land of his birth.

Commssions for portraits were hard to come by, so he moved on to New York where he located a literary agent John Jermaine Slocum who not only lent him money but provided a house to live in rent-free. Lewis responded to this generosity in his customary fashion: he became hostile over business arrangements and never repaid the money.

He returned with Gladys to Canada, but spent more time searching for commissions than executing them. He began looking for an ‘artist in residence’ appointment, fell on hard times, and was regularly sponging on his ex-wife Iris Barry.

Then in 1942 his luck changed. He was commissioned by Sir Kenneth Clark to produce a visual record of Canada’s activity in assisting the war effort. He also secured some public lectures via the good services of a young Marshall McLuhan who organised a slightly dubious publicity venture to lure rich patrons. He rewarded his benefactor with outbursts of paranoid hostility.

After six years abroad he returned to England the very week that the war ended. He was met by bills for unpaid rent and taxes covering the period of his absence. All efforts to resume normal productive life were hampered by post-war austerity. There was food and fuel rationing, shortage of comfort, money, and worst of all – no gin. At a physical level, his eyesight was failing, his teeth were decaying, and the apartment had dry rot.

Whilst he continued to behave in a selfish and curmudgeonly fashion to his friends and benefactors, it should be said in his favour that as art critic of The Listener he championed the causes of painters such as Robert Colquhoun, Francis Bacon, Robert MacBride, Victor Pasmore, and Ceri Richards who at that time were not well known.

The problems with his eyesight got worse, and an X-ray revealed a calcified tumour at the base of his brain. All known treatments were extremely dangerous. To make matters worse, his wife Gladys became mentally erratic and began to sink into a mild form of paranoia. Eventually he became completely blind, but continued writing, both by using a dictaphone and even writing by hand with a Biro on large sheets of paper.

Two very different twists of fortune affected his final years. Repeated conflicts with his wife led to a separation: he went to live with an old flame Agnes Bedford in Belgravia. But he was given a £250 per year pension in the Civil Lists (which Winston Churchill later increased to £500) and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leeds University.

Despite delays in production, his critical essay The Demon of Progress in the Arts was published, as was his late novel Self Condemned, and there was a retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Tate Gallery which was well received.

But he felt that all these accolades had come too late. His personal life was in ruins. He was under an eviction order from the council who wanted to demolish his home and studio. And there was no let up from the tumour in his brain. It eventually killed him at the age of seventy-two.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Some Kind of Genius – Buy the book at Amazon UK

Some Kind of Genius – Buy the book at Amazon US


Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000, pp.697, ISBN: 0224031023


More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts


Filed Under: Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Wyndham Lewis

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in