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'An Embryonic Vorticist'?: William Rothenstein and Wyndham Lewis

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'An Embryonic Vorticist'?: William Rothenstein and Wyndham Lewis ‘An embryonic Vorticist’?: William Rothenstein and Wyndham Lewis ________ Samuel Shaw I could draw up a list for an ideal Royal Academy; and in any list so composed Sir William Rothenstein would be my President. Wyndham Lewis, 1938 1 ‘Though he is not with them, he is not divorced’, claimed a reviewer of William Rothenstein’s second volume of memoirs in 1932, reflecting on the artist’s relationship to the ‘changing aims and technique, aspirations and revolts, of the younger artists’. 2 Rothenstein is the kind of artist or critic, the reviewer contends, who ‘keeps to the middle of the road’. This is a relatively typical assessment; one which was given glorious physical form in a television debate several years later – an event which marked the television debut of both Rothenstein and his old friend Wyndham Lewis. The circumstances are well known. In 1939, the BBC sought to stage a debate on modern art. To this purpose they brought together two teams: the council for the defence represented by Lewis and Geoffrey Grigson; the council for the prosecution by Sir Reginald Blomfield and A. K. Lawrence. Keeping order – and thus sitting in the very centre of the group – was Sir William Rothenstein, whom Grigson described as ‘perched up above us to see fair play, like a little owl on the table, who blinked slowly as owls do.’ 3 The debate was not terribly successful. Hubert Nicholson, watching from the wings, was ‘not impressed with the quality of the debate’, and felt that ‘no single aesthetic doctrine was soundly presented by either side’. 4 Lewis arrived ‘like a bull spruced for a show […]’, but ‘he roared like a sucking dove. […] The anti-moderns spoke far more effectively, though I disagreed with nearly everything they said’ (Nicholson, HDN 225). Blomfield, whose 1934 book Modernismus had contained a withering attack on modern art and architecture, turned out to be disruptively ‘large and kind and courteous’ in person, so much so that even Grigson thought it ‘a shame to be twitting him under the arc- 63 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies lamps’ (Grigson, CS 187). 5 Comfort came in the fact that ‘from so kind a mouth dropped such toads, such sprawling imbecilities and puerilities. And one after another he called into vision pictures of such emptiness that I had to wonder whether this dear old man had ever been alive at all, had ever been twenty, rebellious, enthusiastic, and full of certitude’ (Grigson, CS 187). All the while, ‘the little owl above blinked and committed himself neither way’ (Grigson, CS 187). It is not known who invited Rothenstein to preside over the debate, though it seems to have been a natural choice. Rothenstein had recently lectured for the BBC (the title of his paper was Whither Painting? ) and was by now a well-known figure in British society. 6 His recently published memoirs had been very well received, and he had long impressed people with his ‘extraordinary capacity for mixing in all companies’ and ‘charity of judgment’ (phrases which probably could not have been used in reference to the other men taking part in the debate). 7 Typically, Rothenstein was on good terms with men in both teams; Lewis he had known since the turn of the century, while Blomfield was, as he wrote in 1922, ‘a very old and delightful friend of mine’. 8 Herein lies one of the major problems with Rothenstein: in failing to take obvious sides, he often found himself in a critical hinterland. Catholicity of this sort tends to come across as vagueness; widespread generosity as an inability to settle on any one cause. This is not to say that Rothenstein never committed to, or was associated with, any sort of aesthetic position, but that his beliefs were obfuscated by his inability to put them in a distinct or memorable form. He was an elegant and talented writer, with a neat turn of phrase and wry sense of humour. There were many issues about which he felt strongly, and occasionally his passions did rise to the surface. On the whole, however, the charitable Rothenstein held sway. When he gave his memoirs to the novelist Arnold Bennett to proof-read in 1930, the writer responded positively, whilst adding: ‘I think that on the whole you are apt to be rather too kind. I should have liked more harshness. It gives salt to a book. Why not?’ 9 Salt, however, was not in Rothenstein’s blood. He was destined, as he once admitted, to be only ‘a little of a revolutionary: not a conventional rebel instinctively taking part in every anarchical movement; but rebelling against anything that, however revolutionary it appeared, had really become a convention’. 10 As a result of this, most of his rebellions fell on deaf ears. His stubborn rejection of the Royal Academy, for instance, did not stop him becoming, in the eyes of many, 64 Rothenstein and Lewis a part of the artistic establishment. 11 Other battles – such as his long- running campaign for state-sponsored art projects – were undercut by uncertainty. The Leeds Town Hall project of 1920, in which Rothenstein oversaw an adventurous programme of mural designs, led by young artists including Jacob Kramer, Edward Wadsworth, Paul Nash, and Stanley Spencer, was beset from the start by bureaucratic problems, which Rothenstein failed to overcome. There is often the sense with Rothenstein that he was poised on the edge of great things, but lacked the spirit, or salt, to see them through. This was certainly the opinion of Geoffrey Grigson, who would later denounce Rothenstein as a ‘ridiculous’ figure who had forsaken the Paris of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec to forge an ‘in-between career’ within the English art establishment. 12 In a review that contains more than enough of the ‘harshness’ Bennett missed in Rothenstein’s prose, Grigson makes clear his lack of sympathy regarding the artist’s isolation: ‘it means that Rothenstein, though sensitive and intelligent enough to distinguish (in not too loud a voice) between eunuchs and entires, was too weak to stick to the real thing’ (Grigson, HU 26). Rarely has an artist been dismissed as cruelly as Grigson dismisses Rothenstein. Opening with the following statement: ‘Will Rothenstein’s name wouldn’t occur to anyone making a list of, shall I say, the 60 best painters in Europe in the last 60 years, or even the best 60 painters in England’, Grigson goes on to argue that the artist ‘had next to no talent to sell’ (Grigson, HU 26). As far as Grigson was concerned, Rothenstein was no different from Blomfield and A. K. Lawrence. If anything, he was worse: he lacked the confidence to be truly conservative. The view from 1962 was not, thus, a rosy one. Eight years later, however, Apollo magazine provided proof that Lewis, Grigson’s fellow defender of modern art, had taken a much kindlier view of Rothenstein, by publishing an article Lewis had written, but not published, shortly before the television debate. This article served, and continues to serve, as a reminder that Rothenstein was not a figure of fun for all modern- ists; that there was more to him than the tireless social-networker who had once known Degas. Lewis’s relationship with Rothenstein has hitherto been dealt with only in brief, with Rothenstein credited as one of a few senior artists Rothenstein looked up to in the early years of the century. In fact, their friendship lasted longer than this, with Lewis going on to write what are probably two of the better, and certainly most telling, reviews that Rothenstein was ever to receive. 13 The aim of 65 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies this article is to explore these reviews, and to put forward reasons for why Lewis was more inclined than Grigson to embrace Rothenstein’s oeuvre . Before doing this, however, I wish to outline the history of Lewis’s and Rothenstein’s relationship. To Grigson, Rothenstein was very much a senior figure: a generation apart. Lewis, however, had known Rothenstein for many years, and was closely involved with his family. William’s older brother Charles, for instance, was one of Lewis’s most dedicated collectors.14 Later in life Lewis would also forge a close friendship with William’s eldest son John, who was a keen supporter of his work. 15 It is most likely, though, that William’s first contact with Lewis came through his younger brother Albert, who was Lewis’s contemporary at the Slade School of Art in the last two years of the 1890s. 16 A catalogue of Rothenstein’s portrait drawings, compiled in 1926, lists two chalk portraits of Lewis, since lost, dated 1899, which seem to confirm this – overturning the traditional view that the two men did not meet until after 1902. 17 Certainly they had made friends by 1903, when Rothenstein introduced Lewis to Augustus John, who made several etchings and drawings of the young artist. 18 This encounter is typical of Rothenstein: if he was not always influential in himself, he nonetheless had a knack of putting the right people in contact with each other. It was Augustus John, after all, who was to have the greater influence on Lewis during this period, though their relationship was a fraught one, with both men prone to quarrelling. 19 Despite this, Lewis and Rothenstein did have things in common – not least a deep interest in Spanish art. Rothenstein had travelled to Spain in 1895, and had recently published the first English monograph on Goya. Lewis visited Spain with Spencer Gore in 1902. Both men had also travelled widely throughout France, and had wide knowledge of contemporary art movements in Paris.
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