Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

The Enemy, the third magazine that Wyndham Lewis edited (the first was BLAST, the magazine of the Vorticists), ran from 1927 to 1929, and was largely written by Lewis himself. In it he declared himself the enemy of all that was fashionable and pseudo-revolutionary in contemporary culture. He produced several semi-figurative, semi-abstract ink drawings to illustrate his literary work during this period, and this strutting figure made one of his most striking and successful cover designs. For the cover of The Enemy No. 3 the present work is reproduced twice in a perspectival pairing.

The former owner, Hugh Kenner, wrote of these ink-drawings, 'They are all perfectly distinct from one another: one indolent, one vain, one slack, one vapid, one aggressively sexual though sexually equivocal. . . . Their suggestions of costume are normally oriental, rich, ornate, bewildering, stylish, mindless' (H. Kenner, ‘The Visual World of Wyndham Lewis’, in W. Michel, op. cit., pp. 30–31).

We are very grateful to Professor Paul Edwards for preparing this catalogue entry.