Edinburgh Companion to Wyndham Lewis and the Arts

Wyndham Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s most formidable and polarising artistic intelligences – a painter, novelist, critic, editor and polemicist whose career traversed two world wars and saw the founding of Vorticism. This Companion maps the full range of Wyndham Lewis’s engagement with the arts across six domains: aesthetics; the visual arts; literature; architecture, music and theatre; art education; and media. Bringing together an international team of scholars and curators, it features new readings of Lewis’s major avant-garde publications, including BLAST, The Tyro, Tarr and The Apes of God, as well as lesser-known works such as his war art and radio adaptations. It offers insight into Lewis’s relationships with key modernist contemporaries, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Vassily Kandinsky, James Joyce, Robert Colquhoun, Michael Ayrton and Helen Saunders. It also confronts Lewis’s controversial legacies: his fascist sympathies, his critiques of modernism and his mentorship of post-war artists. Working across art history, literary studies, musicology, theatre studies and media theory, this Companion’s contributors demonstrate that Lewis’s Renaissance ambition to move between arts without dilution shaped a consistent, if combative, artistic project.