Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957), the self-styled 'Enemy', was the most important British writer-artist of the twentieth century. In this, the first introduction to explore Lewis's work both as a painter and a writer, Richard Humphreys examines his hugely varied output, and explains his ideas about art, life and politics.

Leader of the Vorticist movement before the First World War, Lewis was a pioneer of modernism in Britain. As well as creating a powerful body of paintings and drawings, and editing magazines such as Blast and The Tyro, Lewis wrote short stories, essays, novels and books on philosophy, literature, politics and cultural criticism. Dogged by controversy as a satirist and for his political views between the wars, Lewis lived in North America during the Second World War before ending his career, blind, in London.

Fully illustrated throughout, Wyndham Lewis examines the legacy of this controversial but inspiring figure, the scale of whose contribution to the history of modernism is at last being recognised.

Richard Humphreys is Curator, Programme Research at Tate, and author of The Tate Britain Companion to British Art.