Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

Wyndham Lewis produced a series of abstract designs in 1921-22, consolidating the modernist visual revolution that he felt had become bogged down in ‘classicism’ and (in England) imitative dilettantism. Five cubist figures or totems, each an inventive variation of its fellows, stand (or float like ghosts) in an ambiguous space that seems at one moment flat, at another a stage framed by a proscenium. Lewis wrote in the introduction to his Tate Gallery Retrospective in 1956, 'I had at all times the desire to project a race of visually logical beings ... If I had given them a name it would probably have been monads'. In the early twenties he argued that visual art could take on some of the function traditionally performed by philosophy; Figure Composition asks questions about existence, but does so in a purely visual form. It also shows Lewis as one of the most advanced painters in Europe.

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