Lewis called Kate Lechmere ‘Jacques’ because she was reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he first met her. His long black hair suggested to her a nom d’amour for him: ‘Golliwog’. He took charge of her reading, urging on her the ‘disreputable Slav literature’ of Dostoevsky and Gorki. They were lovers briefly, probably in 1912, and, if the postscript on one letter is anything to go by, their relations were affectionate. ‘As many kisses as the envelope will hold’, he wrote. ‘The rest I keep in my mouth for you.’ In retrospect Kate Lechmere viewed their short affair and subsequent friendship as ‘most amicable . . . most amusing and entertaining’. She must have laughed a great deal. It might indeed be said that her laugh became an inspiration to him.
The whereabouts of Olive Johnson, consigned to the background of his life for the time being, is uncertain. Hoel, known as Peter, was probably being looked after by Lewis’s mother.
*
There was a dispute over money as the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition came down at the end of January 1913. ‘When the time came to pay artists their share of the purchase amounts of pictures sold, Roger [Fry] insisted upon deducting a higher commission without any explanation or apology to the painters. Most of them meekly accepted what they were given, but Wyndham Lewis, at best of times a bilious and cantankerous man, protested violently. Roger was adamant in ignoring him and his demands.’ This at least was the partisan recollection of Leonard Woolf.
Lewis’s work had excited considerable attention, and sales of his work may, as a result, have been brisk. No records survive as to how brisk, nor of the commission Fry claimed and Lewis disputed. But, perhaps as a result of this unpleasantness, Fry did not include Lewis’s work in the slimmed-down version of the exhibition he sent to Liverpool in February. When Lewis discovered the slight he wrote to Fry for an explanation and received the reply: ‘I forgot to ask if you had anything to send.’ Lewis wrote back, apparently more in sorrow than in anger:
all other contributors . . . were asked . . . if their paintings or drawings . . . should be sent . . . The implication is obvious. I am animated by most cordial sentiments as regards yourself and your activities. But to continue in an atmosphere of special criticism and illwill . . . would have manifest disadvantages, as well as being distasteful, to me.
Such disadvantages, of course, were primarily financial. Failure to have his work shown in Liverpool meant one less chance of selling. ‘An attitude of denigrement on your part, or abscence of cordiality’, he told Fry, ‘might hurt my stomach as well as my vanity.’
Some sort of reconciliation must have been arrived at, because in late March Lewis participated in one further exhibition organised by Fry. This was the Grafton Group show at the Alpine Club Gallery in Mill Street. The Group comprised Fry himself, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Frederick Etchells and Lewis. There were also paintings by Winifred Gill, Etchells’s sister Jessie, Cuthbert Hamilton, Edward Wadsworth, Spencer Gore, Christopher Nevinson, and other non-members, including contributions by Wassily Kandinsky and Max Weber. All these artists exhibited ‘by invitation’. Critics were somewhat nonplussed by Fry’s policy of showing works anonymously. There were no names and no titles, the catalogue consisting only of a sequence of numbers: one to sixty. This was intended to give the viewer ‘a fresh impression of [the work] without the slight and almost unconscious predilection which a name generally arouses’. The policy irritated C. Lewis Hind, writing for the Daily Chronicle: ‘It is not difficult to discover the parents of most of the pictures, but why try?’ Many of the works he found ‘refreshed by talent’ but ‘none deluged by genius’. He recalled a picture of ‘smiling, archaic women’ and references from other sources identify this as Lewis’s contribution to the show.
The Pall Mall Gazette correspondent mentioned a large cartoon of three women as being ‘a synthesis of laughter’. The Daily Telegraph critic, having presumably been told which was Lewis’s picture and, in the absence of a title in the catalogue, supplying one of his own, wrote: ‘If his composition of life size figures, Three Women, is not a picture, hardly, indeed a work of art at all, it is a very powerful design of its kind.’ Kate Lechmere remembered a painting which comprised three portraits of herself with large grinning faces and folded arms.
According to Lewis, a ‘large paper-picture’ was destroyed, 15 years later, in a flooded cellar of the Tate Gallery. The description, ‘an over-lifesize gouache of three smiling women’ predominantly ‘reddish’ in colour, coincides with what little is known of the work exhibited in the Grafton Group exhibition. Its progress from the Alpine Club Gallery to the bottom of several fathoms of muddy Thames water is a confused tale of not one, but two lost pictures, differentiated in the documentation of the time by nothing more than a single definite article.
A month after the large cartoon was shown in the Grafton Group exhibition, anonymous, untitled, and ‘undistinguished even by a number’, another large cartoon appeared at the Goupil Gallery. This time the catalogue gave it a number: 139, an attribution: P. Wyndham Lewis, and also a title: The Laughing Woman.
Prior to his embarkation for Flanders with the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1917, Lewis compiled an inventory of his work in which ‘a large paper roll, cartoon, “The Laughing Woman” ’ was listed. A photograph shows the angular figure of a grinning woman, recognisable, even in semi-abstraction, as Kate Lechmere. A curved shape to the left of the head might represent a rounded window or recess. This detail suggests the picture may have been based upon a section of the three-figure composition shown at the Alpine Club Gallery in which the Athenaeum critic had noticed ‘arched alcoves’ in the background. Also clearly visible in the photograph are horizontal and vertical lines showing the work to be made of several sheets of paper. Left behind in 1917 with Helen Saunders, this was clearly the ‘large paper roll’ mentioned in his inventory. There is another photograph which shows how large it was. Lewis, clad in waistcoat, scarf and overcoat, stands in front of the framed cartoon and, by happy chance, another picture, the precise size of which is known, was leaning against it when the photograph was taken. From the relatively modest dimensions of Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair, coincidentally another grinning image of Kate Lechmere, The Laughing Woman can be proportionately calculated to somewhere over six feet high and four feet wide.
This substantial cartoon, hung in the Goupil Gallery that April, was part of an exhibition mounted by the Contemporary Art Society. Presided over by Lord Howard de Walden, the CAS had been formed in 1910, its purpose ‘the acquisition of Works of Modern Art for loan or gift to Public Galleries’. The 18-man committee included Charles Aitken, director of the Tate Gallery, Edward Marsh, Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, the First Sea Lord, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Members of the Committee were appointed buyers in rotation for six-month periods. This meant that no single individual’s taste would be discernible in the overall accumulation of works in the Society’s possession. On show at the Goupil Gallery were recent acquisitions, including John’s portrait of Dorelia, The Smiling Woman, which may incidentally have provided inspiration for the jagged likenesses of Kate Lechmere.
The Society’s ‘recent acquisitions’ were augmented by loans of which Lewis’s The Laughing Woman was one.
At the end of May Roger Fry wrote to his friend G. Lowes Dickinson that his new enterprise, ‘Omega Workshops Ltd., Artist Decorators’, intended to introduce Post-Impressionist design to the domestic furnishings of the cultured classes, was under way: ‘I’ve got to make it pay or goodness knows what’ll become of me, let alone the group of artists who are already dependent on it. God knows how they lived before they got their thirty shillings a week from my workshop.’
The painters of the Grafton Group formed Fry’s core workforce: Duncan Grant, Frederick Etchells, Vanessa Bell and Lewis. It expanded to include Cuthbert Hamilton, Edward Wadsworth, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Winifred Gill, Nina Hamnett, and a designer of stained glass, John ‘Jock’ Turnbull.
But the purchasers of artefacts designed and made in the first-floor rooms of the large Adam house at 33 Fitzroy Square would be unaware of who had made what. Fry insisted on anonymity for all contributions, the only signature being the company stamp: the last letter of the Greek alphabet.
From memories of the Omega’s early days recorded by Winifred Gill, Lewis emerges as a self-conscious, rather ridiculous figure, who was ‘building up what would now be called a public “image” ’.
Without realising it, he afforded Miss Gill a rare glimpse of this image cultivation. She was resting on a bedstead in the back showroom, concealed by a shadow to the left of the window and opposite the door. It was late afternoon and getting dark. ‘Suddenly the door burst open and in rushed Wyndham Lewis carrying a large paper bag which he threw onto a small table.’ The bag contained an outsize cloth cap made in a large black and white check material: the height of fashion. ‘Lewis . . . tried it on in front of the looking glass on the mantel piece. He cocked it slightly to one side to his satisfaction, then, taking a few steps backward, raised his hand as though to shake hands with someone and approached the mirror with an ingratiating smile. He backed again and tried the effect of a sudden recognition with a look of surprised pleasure. Then, cocking the cap at a more dashing angle his face froze and he turned and glanced over his shoulder with a look of scorn and disgust.’ Throughout this embarrassing would-be solitary performance, the reluctant spy feigned sleep, terrified at what he might do to her if he discovered he had been observed. Finally Lewis snatched the cap from his head, thrust it back into its paper bag and left. She heard his boots clattering down the stairs. The coast clear she went back to the studio and recounted the incident to her fellow worker, ‘Jock’ Turnbull. ‘Ye were never nearer being murdered in yer life,’ he told her, ‘no man could have let yer live.’
On another occasion she remembered a black sombrero, the first royal blue shirt she had ever seen, and carefully clipped oblongs of whisker in front of each ear: ‘sideboards’. Capitalising upon his dark good looks, the ‘image’ was now unmistakably Spanish and Miss Gill thought (mistakenly) that he had just returned from a visit to that country.
It was a day in late July and he was lounging at a table in the main workroom, his long legs stretched out in front of him. A friend appeared in the doorway and Lewis asked:
‘Been to the show?’
‘No, have you?’
‘. . . . There this morning.’
‘Oh, anything worth seeing?’
‘. . . . Very fine head by Brancusi.’
The friend departed and Lewis raised his hand in farewell: ‘Adios’. Miss Gill explained that the four dots represented ‘a portentous intake of breath issuing in a rich, deliberate speech’. She recalled that a few minutes later, somebody else popped their head round the door:
‘Been to the show?’
‘No, have you?’
‘. . . . There this morning.’
‘Oh, anything worth seeing?’
‘. . . . Very fine head by Brancusi.’
‘Adios.’
In all he conducted the identical exchange no less than three times.
The show referred to was at the Albert Hall – the sixth London Salon of the Allied Artists’ Association – and Constantin Brancusi was represented by three heads, two in brass and one in stone. Lewis himself contributed two drawings and a large oil singled out for special notice by Roger Fry in The Nation:
‘Group’ . . . is more completely realised than anything he has shown yet. His power of selecting those lines of movement and those sequences of mass which express his personal feeling, is increasing visibly. In this work the mood is Michaelangelesque in its sombre and tragic intensity. Mr Lewis is no primitive.
Despite such fulsome praise, Lewis still suspected Fry of undervaluing his work. He would not have forgotten being passed over when the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition transferred to Liverpool.
Although Miss Gill could not recall seeing Lewis do anything at 33 Fitzroy Square apart from pose in front of a mirror and chat to passing acquaintances, he did in fact do some work to earn the 30 shillings a week Fry paid him. A screen showing circus performers cavorting on its four panels figured prominently in a photograph of the Omega Showroom in the Daily News and Leader. He also produced a set of nine fan-shaped figurative designs for lampshades. Perhaps in an effort to shock her, Lewis told Miss Gill that he intended four of the designs to be viewed as a sequence: ‘stages in the bargaining between a roué and a procuress for the purchase of a young woman’.
*
At a committee meeting on 9 June, Clive Bell was appointed six-monthly buyer for the Contemporary Art Society with effect from 1 July. During his term of duty he bought seven pictures: a Duncan Grant, a Lucien Pissarro, a Harold Squire, a Cuthbert Hamilton, a Frederick Etchells, a still life by Jessie Etchells and Laughing Woman by Wyndham Lewis.
Lack of a definite article in the title noted in CAS minutes is the first clue that the picture Bell purchased was not the cartoon exhibited at the Goupil Gallery as The Laughing Woman. In Lewis’s 1917 inventory, distinct from the ‘large paper roll’, left with Miss Saunders, was:
‘Laughing Woman’ painting in possession of the Contemporary Art Society.
In late June or early July it seemed as if Lewis was planning to paint a canvas for Bell’s consideration. ‘I’m afraid the Society would never let me buy outright a picture that I had not seen’, Bell told him. ‘I liked the cartoon so much that, unless you are going to do something very different, I can’t doubt that I shall like the picture; but I’m afraid I must reserve a right of final judgement.’ The cartoon Bell had liked so much was probably the large gouache from the Grafton Group Exhibition showing three laughing versions of Kate Lechmere. He told Lewis it reminded him of Giotto. Along with Cézanne, Giotto was probably much in Bell’s thoughts in the latter half of 1913 as he prepared his little book, Art, for publication. Every picture he considered purchasing for the CAS would have been rigorously measured, as an example of ‘significant form’, against Cézanne or the 14th-century master of the Arena frescoes at Padua. The arches in the background of Lewis’s picture, the ‘archaic’ figures and, if it bore any resemblance to Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair, the muted colour and stylised fall of drapery, may all have combined to bring Giotto to mind.
Lewis did not produce the promised canvas. He must have persuaded Bell to buy the gouache cartoon for the Contemporary Art Society instead. In August he received a cheque for £50, and plans were made to mount the paper onto canvas. The job was to be carried out in Vanessa’s studio and Bell made fretful preparations. ‘My wife tells me that stretching a big canvas is a complicated affair and two men’s job. Do be sure to send capable workmen: it would be too maddening if anything were to miscarry.’ There was even a space on the end wall of the studio where it could be hung for the time being. Fashionable taste had moved on and a large canvas, The Childhood of Pyramus, by Augustus John, bought five years before, had recently been sold. ‘The chains and hooks remain’, said Bell, adding that it would be interesting to see the new picture on the wall. ‘If you see your men before they start you might tell them to bring screws, tools, etc. Perhaps it would amuse you to come and see it when in place? or to supervise the work of hanging.’