Wyndham Lewis

Picked up a lovely second hand copy of Wyndham Lewis’ The Demon of Progress in the Arts. Lewis is the subject of an interesting early book by Jameson, who contends that Lewis’s ‘reactionary’ viewpoint nonetheless, precisely as reactionary, offers a critical vantage point from which to think about capitalism and the arts. Anyway, here are a couple of quotations on the theme of the New in modernism. It’s wrong, I think, but productively wrong:

In the eighteenth and in the seventeenth centuries there was the homogeneity of the discipline, the like-thinking of a classical norm. The turning point was political; the era of political revolution was followed by the era of perpetual revolution in the arts. Half-way through the last century the revolutionary zest, the turmoil of schools, the roaring of slogans and watchwords, began to assume a crazy intensity. But at present, halfway through the twentieth century, revolution, of a visual kind, appears to have stabilised at a point which is as far as it is possible to go technically, without disappearing altogether – without the arts committing suicide. There are several schools on the continent which the slightest push would tip over the blankness of the great zero.

For the last hundred years the art student has found himself at the centre of a brawl between old and new, assailed by the claims of schools or of leading artists to be ahead in the race, or to possess some secret of technical up-to-dateness..

The mercurial masters of the budding century had to give the student mass a new sensation every few years, or even, if they felt they were losing ground, every few months, by going red, or by going blue.