ABSTRACT
Wyndham Lewis was arguably the most marginalized figure of the modernist movement. Despite his debt to modernism, Lewis would go on to establish a reputation as the most strident critic of the modernist movement. Lewis clashed with Marinetti but his first public break would be with Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops, an affiliation that he believed undermined his own artistic will to transform society. Hulme and Lewis emerged as proponents of authoritarianism in the modernist movement, the basis of which was a rejection of Renaissance humanism which, they argued, upheld the perfectibility of humanity and the progressive amelioration of society. Reports on Lewis's character suggest he was a difficult person who could turn on friends in a second. His obsession with the "externality" of things became a personal aesthetic. In the retrospective show and exhibition on Vorticism, the year before his death, Lewis was still courting the same opposition that undermined his best literary and artistic production.
