ABSTRACT
Despite the existence of a respectable body of criticism, Wyndham Lewis remains a marginalized figure where the theorization of modernism is concerned. In this chapter I propose to take another look at his work by identifying his version of Vorticism (roughly 1913-1915) as a problematic and unstable form of aesthetic practice which can be related to a sense of epistemological crisis originating in his earlier thought. The nature of this crisis depends initially on our acceptance of Vorticism as a peculiar form of closure, which I have labelled ‘objectivism’, characterized by an opposition to what might loosely be described as an emphasis on the subjective in rival modernisms, most obviously the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the aesthetics of Cubism and Futurism. For the sake of an overview, this issue can initially be approached via Lewis’s views in the late 1920s, before considering the situation of some earlier paintings, drawings and literary exegesis, ultimately as a function of his reception of Nietzsche.
