Download File

1 82 ENGLISH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS
exhibitions strikes me as an unnecessarily
sharp tax on the patience.
I do not grumble at the reappearance of
Wyndham Lewis's Kermesse, which has been
altered and greatly improved since its last
appearance at the London Salon. Lewis
promises to become that rare thing, a real
academic artist. He is academic in the good
sense of the word that is to
say, he uses a
formula of which he is the master and not the
slave. He uses it as a means to vast organiza-
to have
tions of form, designed, I imagine,
something of the austere and impressive unity
of great architecture. He succeeds to a sur-
prising degree. The enemy that dogs him in
all his works is an excessive taste for life.
He is inclined to modify his forms in the
interest of drama and psychology, to the
detriment of pure design. At times his simplifications
and rhythms seem to be determined
by a literary rather than a plastic conception.
Probably this is not the kind of criticism
which by now Wyndham Lewis must have
learnt to disregard. He is more accustomed,
I suspect, to hearing his work called " me-
chanical " and " lifeless," and, in a sense, it
is both. That is the price an artist must pay
who sets himself to achieve the end that Lewis
has in view. He who is working by formula
towards the realization of a minutely definite