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Wyndham Lewis Quotes about Art

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But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Italian, Oil
Wyndham Lewis, Scott W. Klein (2010). “Tarr”, p.7, Oxford University Press

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Use, Advertising
Wyndham Lewis (1969). “Wyndham Lewis: an anthology of his prose”

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Stupid, Mind

Life is art's rival and vice versa.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Vices, Rivals
Wyndham Lewis (1918). “Tarr”

Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Passion, Objectivity
Wyndham Lewis (1929). “The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator”, p.40, Ardent Media

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Stupid, Mind
Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

Then down came the lid--the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, War, World
1937 Blasting and Bombardiering, pt.5,'Toward an Art-Less Society'.

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Sadism, Excess
Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Expression, Preference

If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, People, Manners
Wyndham Lewis (1929). “The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator”, p.38, Ardent Media

To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.

Wyndham Lewis
Art, Strong, Book
Wyndham Lewis (1939). “Wyndham Lewis the Artist”, p.323, Ardent Media

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