‘Impressionistic Fuss’ The rejection of Impressionism, which the Italian painters were keen to emphasise, held little weight for Lewis: he maintained that Futurism, with its naïve enthusiasm for machinery and the 'modern', merely parodied Wilde and Gissing, being a “sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870”. Giacomo …
In one of the more memorable anecdotes from Wyndham Lewis’s first autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, the Vorticist recounts meeting his Futurist counterpart, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in a lavatory (Marinetti had gone to wash after a particularly energetic lecture during which had "drenched himself in sweat"). With characteristically thrasonic gusto, the Italian declares that Lewis is …
The Outsider and The Enemy: Colin Wilson on Wyndham Lewis This paper was presented at the “Filibusters in Birmingham” conference on Wyndham Lewis, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, on 22nd June 2023. In 1956, Colin Wilson published The Outsider, an overnight literary sensation that saw the 24-year-old autodidact hailed as a prodigy and …
Wagner once proposed that it was not enough for music to be merely contemporary or zeitgenössisch, it had to be ahead of itself, summoning from the future forms already lying there in embryo. [1] Two works which achieve exactly this, albeit in the mediums of painting and writing, are Wyndham Lewis’s A Battery Shelled and …
