Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882 -1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited Blast, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.

Lewis was educated in England at Rugby School and then, from 16, the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, but left for Paris without finishing his courses.

Three years later, he moved to Paris where, after discovering Cubism and Expressionism, he created a new movement – Vorticism.

Vorticism is a short-lived but ambitious movement that aimed to give artistic expression to the vitality and raw dynamism of the machine age.Vorticist paintings emphasized ‘modern life’ as an array of bold lines and harsh colors drawing the viewer’s eye into the center of the canvas and vorticist sculpture created energy and intensity through ‘direct carving’.

Lewis was a radical and wanted to challenge compositional harmony in painting.

His Vorticist cityscapes, represented as bold geometric lines that criss-crossed his canvases at sharp angles, were perfectly matched to the noisy, chaotic and claustrophobic London in which he was living.

More of Wyndham Lewis’ bold paintings can be found at https://wyndhamlewissociety.org/.