Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewiswas an English painter and author. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr, and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth18 November 1882
laughter independent important
Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
ideas clothes arbitrary
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.
sex essence way
Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay Since both are in their essence but One-Way Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart And subtle biological counterpart.
depressing cities mind
The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.
teacher mind doe
The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.
men rights perfect
The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.
strong art book
To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.
song cutting black
Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.
air village earth
The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.
anomalies coats top-hats
Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.
waste abundance
Where there is abundance you can afford waste.
laughter self tragedy
Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
practice discipline perception
Lewis sought no disciples, nor does he offer a program or solution, rather his contribution is a critical discipline. Lewis is a stimulant, a mode of perception, rather than a position or practice.
zero artist car
What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice -- the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.