Author: PE
Paul Edwards, Lewis Blog #3
1. Lewis’s draughtsmanship from 1919 to 1923
After ‘Guns’, Lewis wanted to ‘perfect his draughtsmanship’. A lot of the figures in the war drawings can look like wooden toys with poorly articulated limbs.
I don’t think that he had lost his skill as a naturalistic draughtsman, perfected at the Slade. He wanted to do something different (as can be seen in the Baker collection at the V&A). He couldn’t use this pre-war style for war pictures, but the ‘formula’ he came up with instead later disgusted him. He wanted a ‘modern’ style that would enable the viewer to engage with the motif (what was represented – usually a human being), while the drawing itself would be a product of a slightly inhuman, almost mechanical process.
He started with figure drawing – mainly female nudes – in 1919, exploiting the tension between the draughtsman’s inhumanity (some would say misogyny) and the spectator’s sympathy for the sitter (also actually created by the drawing, of course). By 1923 drawing itself had become more human, removed from this world mainly by its almost miraculous accuracy. These were portrait drawings made with hard pencil and thin coloured washes. (Eg, of Nancy Cunard)
2 drawing about the thicker shaded ‘lines’
The drawing I want to talk about – or really just to show you – comes from the middle of this period. Walter Michel catalogues it as no. 506, Seated Lady and dates it 1921–2. It’s made with a soft but very black pencil – maybe even black chalk (I’m not very good at identifying media) – very different from the hard graphite pencil used in 1923, anyway. I would date it to 1920–1921, myself. At the period where he was most in favour of following nature (the late 30s), Lewis said that he could never respect a picture that could not be reduced to a ‘fine, formal abstraction’, and he certainly fulfils that requirement here. There’s nothing much happening in the middle of the sheet. Some lines of the drawing are emphasised by the addition of shading that turns them into bands that from a distance dominate the design and give it an almost centrifugal feel. Or they form another kind of shape, depending on the way a spectator discerns patterning. The balance between abstraction and nature here may tip quite in the opposite direction, however, so that you ‘see’ only the seated figure in the chair. A drawing is a material object; it will look different in different lights or from different distances at different times. In this one, close to, it is noticeable that some lines have been deliberately thickened or doubled, while some remain thin and barely present. In a cursorily observed photograph, a drawing can easily seem much more constant and ideal.
3 Face and features hardly depicted
What you can see is that this is scarcely a ‘portrait’ at all. In other words, the facial features are very minimally represented: no eyes under the brows; nose a short curved line that complements the chin; and a conventional outline for the mouth.
4 A modernist drawing
It has:
‘Impossible’ lines: an obvious example is the one that arcs down across the centre and seemingly defining the upper surface of the sitter’s left leg, but then goes in front of the sitter’s left hand (right of the drawing, of course). Also the line delineating part of the sitter’s right leg (lower middle of the drawing) which must be behind the left one and therefore not actually visible from this viewpoint.
Construction lines: such as the faint line showing the contour of the right leg beneath the skirt.
Absent ‘expected’ lines: the bottom of the skirt, the fingers left ‘open’ at their tips, the absent ankles and feet; and look at the area above the armrest of the chair, on the left of the drawing: how the arm enters the sleeve above the elbow is not described; we only know how the hair falls on the right side of her head because of the small line that makes a nick below the strong line of the shoulder: the fall of the edge of the hair is simply omitted, and we have to infer it despite the contradictory, thick line delineating a shoulder that would actually be hidden by the hair.
5 Signature (and provenance)
The signature clearly dates from the late 1940s, so before then the drawing was unsigned – and it’s still undated. The drawing was originally owned by Richard Wyndham. Perhaps it was given to him as payment of a debt and deliberately left unsigned to annoy him. When Wyndham died in 1948 his pictures went to the Mayor Gallery. Perhaps Freddie Mayor asked Lewis to sign the drawing then. But this is only a theory.
6 Sitter
As I’ve said, it isn’t really a portrait, but I think it displays a definite personality. I believe the sitter was Iris Tree, the friend of Nancy Cunard. Lewis had a brief affair with her in 1920, when I also think the drawing was made. Tree was a Bohemian poet, depicted by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Augustus John and Jacob Epstein. You can see her in her 60s, lying on a chaise longue, in the Fellini film La Dolce Vita. Lewis also depicted her on a chaise longue in a very mannered drawing (online) and an unsuccessful oil that he destroyed.
7. Conclusion
In conclusion, I may also say that this drawing, and Lewis’s aesthetics of the period, constitute an alternative, or even a corrective, to the early aesthetic of Clement Greenberg. You may remember that Greenberg thought modernist painting was on a trajectory through which it retained all the formal devices that artists used for figuration, to represent space and things occupying it, but that ‘modern’ artists would eventually divorce these devices entirely from their representational function, so that what would be left was pure abstraction. In that view, the next stage after this drawing should be total abstraction. But in 1914 Lewis had already disclaimed such an aesthetic trajectory in advance, when he wrote that ‘the finest Art is not pure Abstraction; nor is it unorganized life.’[1], and he was to reiterate his belief in The Demon of Progress in 1954, where he said that the drive to total abstraction was a drive to nothing – a view more metaphysically expressed in Time and Western Man. It seems to me that Lewis in this drawing is flirting with this abstract nothing; but he is also flirting with the real, the human. He does not succumb entirely to either, but masters both; and this is what I like about the drawing.
Paul Edwards
[1] ‘Futurism, Magic and Life’, Blast, no. 1 (July 1914), p. 134.