There was an undercurrent of tension and intrigue in the Bells’ home at 46 Gordon Square on the day in early August that Laughing Woman was stretched and hung. While Lewis was in the studio supervising the workmen, a whispered exchange occurred in a neighbouring room. Concerned that Lewis felt his work was unappreciated at the Omega, Roger Fry asked Clive Bell if he had any idea what grounds the painter had for this belief.
Bell was clearly embarrassed by the question. Lewis had previously complained about Fry, in confidence, and a likely cause of complaint was the major commission that had come the Omega’s way during the previous month. If Lewis had at that time known the full background to this commission, he would not have confined himself to grumbling privately to Clive Bell. Following the discovery of certain facts, two months later, a great many more people were to hear his views on Roger Fry and the Omega Workshop.
But in early August there was only a suspicion that his work was not appreciated. Put on the spot by Fry while Lewis was out of the room seeing to the hanging of his picture, Bell was diplomatic. He told Fry that Lewis thought he did not care for his circus screen. Bell felt this was a sensible thing to say because he had frequently heard Fry praise the screen and was fairly sure that he liked it. It was intended as a tactful way of letting the Omega director know that Lewis may ‘have been given a false impression of his views’.
If Fry was worried that one of his artists felt undervalued, he did not seem to make an immediate effort to redress the suspicion once Laughing Woman was up on the wall and everybody gathered round to look at it. When he wrote to Lewis, Bell attempted to make up for the somewhat lukewarm initial response. ‘Fry and my wife – who may have seemed a little cold at first – liked it better and better till at last they became thoroughly enthusiastic.’ Unfortunately this enthusiasm was only manifested after Lewis had departed. ‘To be sure’, Bell gushed on, ‘I think my wife likes it almost, if not quite as much as I do from the first. Only she is not demonstrative.’
As he was leaving, Lewis took Bell to one side at the door and cautioned him, belatedly, to say nothing whatsoever about him to Fry. ‘I don’t reproach myself with any treachery’, Bell wrote before getting into bed, ‘because after you had asked me to say nothing, nothing was said by me.’
Laughing Woman probably remained on the end wall of the Gordon Square studio, secured by the hooks and chains that had once secured John’s Childhood of Pyramus, until December, when Bell’s period as buyer for the Contemporary Art Society came to an end and he handed it over to the committee with his six other purchases. Bought ‘through Bloomsbury influence’, this was the last time Bloomsbury influence would be exercised to Lewis’s benefit.
In February of the following year Laughing Woman went to Liverpool, part of a CAS exhibition at the Sandon Studio Society in School Lane, where it was shown with other challenging pictures in a separate category of ‘Decorative Cartoons’. The Roscoe Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, Charles Reilly, conceded in the Daily Post that Lewis ‘at any rate allows himself pleasant colour if he deals in forms of nightmare shape’. From Liverpool the exhibition went to Sheffield and then to Leicester.
Returning from the provinces it was stored with the rest of the CAS’s holdings in a cellar room at the Tate Gallery.
*
The loud slamming of a front door followed by a French exclamation from the top of a flight of stairs brought to an end Lewis’s connection with the Omega Workshop and with its director.
In July, P. G. Konody was asked by the Daily Mail to recommend a suitable ‘Futurist’ artist to decorate a room for the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in October. Mme Strindberg, having had some experience in commissioning modern interior design, suggested he give the organisers Gore’s name and address. She wrote to Gore separately, telling him: ‘For God’s sake don’t recommend another man but make the money YOURSELF.’ Nevertheless it was with a joint commission in mind that a Daily Mail agent wrote inviting Gore to the Ideal Home Exhibition offices in Fleet Street a couple of days later. At this preliminary meeting the agent told Gore that a room ‘in an advanced style’ was required and, consulting a slip of paper, said that two other artists had been recommended to share the work: Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis. Gore was then asked to contact the other two and arrange a further meeting ‘to fix it up’. The painter went directly to Fitzroy Square with an illustrated brochure of the previous year’s exhibition. Neither Fry nor Lewis was in when he called, but he explained the offer to Duncan Grant and asked him to pass the message to Fry, suggesting he contact the agent. Gore left the brochure and departed.
At this point in mid-July only Gore, the anonymous Daily Mail agent, and now Grant knew about the proposed commission.
Thereafter the affair became a tangled comedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities for explanation, erupting, in early October, into a row that split the London avant-garde down the middle. Central to the dispute was Lewis’s charge that Fry had stolen the commission for the Omega Workshop and cut out two of the artists for whom it had originally been intended. Fry’s guilt or innocence would seem to hinge upon whether or not he received the message Gore left at Fitzroy Square.
Fifty years later Duncan Grant could not remember Gore’s visit on the day in question but thought it likely that he might have received the message but forgotten to pass it on to Fry. Be that as it may, somehow or other Fry, as director of the Omega Workshop, was given the Daily Mail commission without any conditions as to the artists he would employ.
Fry claimed, in a letter to Gore on 5 October, that the Daily Mail people had approached him directly and that they had made no mention of any other collaborators. But Fry altered his story less than a fortnight later in another letter to Gore dated 18 October:
as you very unfortunately did not deliver the message yourself I think you must take my word for it that I never got it with sufficient clearness to make me consider it as compared with what I thought the quite authoritative full statement of the Daily Mail.
In other words the message had been passed on but had become garbled. The version that Fry received may then have been that the Daily Mail were anxious to commission someone to design and furnish a room and would he, as Omega director, care to come and discuss the matter further? Even if Lewis and Gore had been mentioned by the agent at the subsequent meeting, Fry would doubtless have quoted company policy: ‘the Omega produces its work anonymously and would not expect to have the work distributed beforehand by outsiders amongst various artists.’
The first Lewis heard of the matter was when Fry told him Omega had secured the prestigious commission and would he care to carve a mantelpiece? Feeling his talents would not be shown to best advantage by a lowly piece of woodworking, Lewis claimed that he asked Fry about painting wall decorations instead. He was told that there would be no wall decorations. ‘Nothing at all,’ said Fry, ‘just a few irregular spaces of colours. No decorations.’ Fry later testified that Lewis had wanted to do the carving. ‘It was his own suggestion and I considered it the most interesting and important job in the whole work . . . I didn’t tell him there would be no [wall] decoration.’
Then, in August, Lewis left for his customary summer holiday. Frederick Etchells accompanied him to Dieppe: ‘Lewis had an address and recommendation from Sickert when we arrived, and it turned out to be a charming place in the working-class quarter which would only house one of us. We tossed a coin for it and Lewis won. But I managed to find two pretty rooms at an old douanier’s with a great big Napoleonic bed. So I said to Lewis, “I’ll come and look you up in the morning”, and when I did I found him sitting on a table surrounded by between 80 and 100 dead bugs. He had been up all night killing them with a hammer. I laughed and laughed, so we had a tiff over that.’
Further testimony of his activities was provided by Lytton Strachey in a letter to Dorelia: ‘Did you know that your friend Lewis has been spending his Summer in Dieppe, pursuing bonnes along the plage? – and alas! pursuing in vain.’
A photograph shows Lewis in the bosom of the Sickert family and friends. Long black hair parted down the middle, sporting a thin black moustache and with a light-coloured, flat-crowned felt hat resting on his knee, he sits on a bench next to Sickert’s mother and second wife, Christine. Lewis is the only member of the group who looks at the camera as if consigning the moment and his presence there to posterity.
Olive Johnson joined him in Dieppe and a letter from his mother suggests the visit was not a happy one: ‘I am sorry your holiday has not been successful. Personally I think it is rather a mistake to return to a place you have liked under different conditions.’ This referred to the summer of two years before. The letter continued: ‘I believe if you had taken the child to some English seaside place, you would have enjoyed it more.’ Olive must have brought their son Peter with her. On 4 September mother and father might have commemorated the child’s second birthday in his place of birth. And there may even have been a possibility of history repeating itself, because Olive was pregnant again. However, there is no record in Dieppe from that year of a child’s birth to parents named Lewis or Johnson, so it must be assumed that their daughter, Betty, was born after Olive’s return to London.
Another sentence in his mother’s letter suggests that the carving of the mantelpiece for Omega had not been executed when Lewis left for his holiday, but that he intended carving it when he returned. ‘Perhaps after you have done Fry’s work’, she told him, ‘you can have another little holiday in Paris and enjoy it more.’
He did go to Paris, in late October, but by then the Omega’s ‘Post-Impressionist Room’ had been completed and installed at Olympia without a mantelpiece, carved or otherwise, and Lewis would never work for Fry again.
Arriving back from Dieppe he discovered painted panels destined for the walls of the Ideal Home drawing room all around the Workshop in Fitzroy Square. This would have confirmed the suspicions he had harboured two months before that Fry did not appreciate his work. The grainy coloured photograph of the Omega installation that appeared in the Illustrated London News showed three semi-abstract compositions of dancers not entirely unlike the figures in Lewis’s studies for Kermesse. Clearly this part of the commission would have suited his talents better than the carving of a mantelpiece.
It was a chance meeting with Gore on 4 or 5 of October that brought matters to a head. Lewis would have lost no time in confronting Fry with what Gore had to tell him: that the Ideal Home commission was originally offered to three individual artists, himself among them, rather than to Fry and a group of anonymous ‘workmen’ constituting the Omega Workshop.
He was backed up by Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and Edward Wadsworth when he went to see Fry.
Angry voices might have been heard coming from no. 33, disrupting the Sunday quiet of Fitzroy Square: Lewis accusing Fry of stealing the commission from himself and Gore; Fry protesting that their names had never been mentioned; Lewis reiterating the charges and accusing Fry of calling Gore a liar; perhaps the disparate voices of Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth raised in confused support. Finally there was the clatter of four pairs of boots on the stairs and the thunderous boom of the front door being slammed.
In the silence that followed, Fry was heard to say to no one in particular: ‘Ça, c’est trop fort!’
*
The following weekend a three-page typed circular was sent out from Lewis’s studio in Brecknock Road to Fry’s friends and clients:
Understanding that you are interested in the Omega Workshops, we beg to lay before you the following discreditable facts:
(1) That the Direction of the Omega Workshops secured the decoration of the ‘Post-Impressionist’ room at the Ideal Home Exhibition by a shabby trick.
And there was a second charge.
A day or two before the revelations of his chance meeting with Gore, Lewis had received a letter from Frank Rutter, curator of the Leeds City Art Gallery and founder of the AAA, asking for two or three paintings for the ‘Post-Impressionist and Futurist’ show he was organising at the Doré Galleries later in the month. Rutter told him that this was the second time he had written with this request and had he not received the letter sent care of the Omega Workshop? Lewis had not. Rutter had also written to Fry asking for Etchells’s address, and stating his intention of inviting the latter to contribute also. Rutter, it seems, had been ‘given to understand that Mr Etchells had no pictures ready and would have none till 1914. This statement of Mr Fry’s was not only unauthorised but untrue.’ Hence, the further charge:
(2) . . . the suppression of information in order to prevent a member from exhibiting in a Show of pictures not organised by the Direction of the Omega.
By the time copies of the round robin, signed by Lewis, Wadsworth, Etchells and Hamilton, had been delivered to people having an interest in the Omega Workshop, Fry was out of the country. Just before leaving for Villeneuve-les-Avignon, in fact while he was packing to go, Fry claims he discovered the letter from Rutter to Lewis. Forwarding it on 10 October, he explained that he had opened and read it before realising that it had been addressed to someone else. ‘I . . . can only suppose that you [Lewis] had left it about and that it had got put among my things.’
With Fry on holiday, his friends rallied round to deal with the attack as best they could.
‘We have had a day of it!’ Vanessa Bell wrote to him on 12 October. In the morning Molly MacCarthy had telephoned to say she had received the round robin. She thought Fry must have given Lewis and his friends cause for anger, while Desmond MacCarthy believed that he should defend himself. Fry had other enemies who would derive great satisfaction from the schism. Vanessa’s brother Adrian Stephen and Duncan Grant came round to lend support. Grant and Vanessa went to see Etchells that afternoon to try to get him to see that whether he and Lewis were right or wrong about Fry, they had ‘behaved monstrously’ in writing the circular letter without first accusing him to his face. They talked for two hours and it was only with great difficulty that Etchells could be made to see their point. ‘When he did see it he simply said that he didn’t agree.’ Regarding his specific accusation that Fry had told Rutter that he had nothing to send to the Doré Gallery, Vanessa had a disloyal thought about her friend. ‘I only hope [you] didn’t say that Etchells had no paintings! Apparently he had several.’
She and Grant returned to Gordon Square. By this time Desmond MacCarthy had come round and he and Clive were drafting letters which Fry might possibly send to answer the accusations. ‘I think it rather depends on whether Rutter and the Daily Mail produce clear evidence.’ By late afternoon Leonard Woolf had joined the discussion. He was for Fry taking no notice of the charges. Clive Bell was inclined to agree. ‘The whole thing’s a matter of character and surely yours is good enough to stand a little scurrilous rhetoric. Everyone who knows what’s what will draw his own conclusions from the style of the circular . . . What about saying nothing, or at any rate about waiting before you say anything?’
The following day Bell met Lewis by chance in Bond Street. Lewis came forward and said: ‘I hope you’re not very upset!’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Bell, ‘not in the least.’ They walked on together, Lewis claiming that he had had to use politics to defend his interests because he ‘had his way to make’. Bell told him that he thought the circular was ‘a silly and suburban affair which would convince no one of anything but the folly of the writers’.
‘Suburban’ was perhaps the most pejorative adjective in Clive Bell’s vocabulary. He used it again in a letter to Lewis the following day: ‘you ought not to bombard the town with pages of suburban rhetoric. The vulgarity of the thing! And the provincialism! That’s what I mind. You don’t belong in the suburbs, so what the devil are you doing there?’
Faced with Bell’s obvious disapproval as they walked down Bond Street and into Piccadilly, Lewis seemed to have second thoughts about his attack on Fry. He put the responsibility for the round robin on Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth, explaining that it was not the sort of thing he liked doing. He hoped that his former colleagues at the Omega were not hurt by the remarks about ‘Prettiness’,* that he for one had not wanted to put in that sort of thing. Lewis had not been in a conciliatory mood to start with and his ‘admissions were only made as he saw that he might have made himself rather foolish over this letter and so tended to make light of it.’
This account of the conversation was communicated by Bell to his wife and by her to Fry. It was therefore not only far from being impartial but was also at third hand – a fact that Vanessa admitted to Fry: ‘But of course you won’t take my report of their conversation as pretending to be accurate.’
Vanessa told Fry that Bell got the impression that ‘they are all longing for you to reply. Lewis was very much disappointed that you had not rushed back from France at once! What they would really like would be an action for libel.’ This does seem to be the case, because Lewis had already engaged the services of a solicitor in preparation for such an eventuality. On 18 October, when no response had come from Fry, Vandercom & Co. charged Lewis two guineas and regretted the affair had not gone further. ‘I am very sorry to hear that the letter failed to arouse Roger Fry, and I hope that you have succeeded in impressing some of his supporters.’
G. Lowes Dickinson, for one, was far from impressed. ‘I have received from you a libellous letter dealing with the affairs of the Omega Workshop’, he wrote to Lewis. ‘You must be as stupid as you are malicious to send such a letter to Mr Fry’s friends, who all know him to be incapable of any such conduct as you describe. I trust you will not trouble me further with these sordid intrigues.’
The allegations contained in the round robin were certainly libellous, and Lewis was perhaps fortunate that Fry took no action. On the charge of stealing the Ideal Home commission, all that Lewis could direct at Fry was the word of Spencer Gore. Fry, however, could defend himself with documentary proof to the contrary. The day after Bell’s conversation with Lewis, Vanessa went to the Ideal Home Exhibition offices at Olympia and the secretary, Mr F. G. Bussy, furnished her with a letter confirming Fry’s story:
The commission to furnish and decorate a room at Olympia was given by the Daily Mail to Roger Fry without any conditions as to the artists he would employ. In the conversation between our representative and Mr Roger Fry, there was no question of collaboration between Omega Workshops and any other artist or artists. The names of Mr Spencer Gore and Mr Wynham [sic] Lewis were not mentioned by our representative to Mr Roger Fry so far as he can remember, neither do we recollect having any interview with either of the latter gentlemen.
That Fry came by one Ideal Home commission honestly is proved. What will never be known for certain is whether he had been aware of another, earlier offer, from a different official, which he chose to ignore. Perhaps he had been guilty of misappropriation by default and for this reason, even with Mr Bussy’s affidavit, he did not pursue a libel action.
A month after Lewis and his lieutenants slammed out of 33 Fitzroy Square, Fry was maintaining silence: ‘I think people are in hopes of something dramatic on my part to get things on the move again. But I think I shall not oblige.’
It can readily be assumed that the Ideal Home affair was the main topic of conversation, gossip and speculation at the Private View of the Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition from 10 until 6 o’clock on 16 October. Those present at the Doré Galleries who had received a copy of the round robin earlier in the week would know that Roger Fry was alleged to have lied to the exhibition organiser, Frank Rutter, when he told him that Frederick Etchells had no work to show. Recipients of the circular would also have known that a letter, in connection with this same exhibition, and addressed to Wyndham Lewis at the Omega Workshop, had mysteriously gone astray. And anybody present, taking a break from conversation about such matters to cast an eye over the Doré’s walls, would probably have remarked upon the absence of any works by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry.
And when another exhibition opened at the Alpine Club Galleries two months later in January 1914 the Athenaeum correspondent noted that the names, ‘Mrs Clive Bell, Mr Roger Fry, and Mr Duncan Grant’, on the outside of the catalogue now represented the sole members of the Grafton Group.
The schism was complete.
*
Towards the end of October Lewis went to Paris for a couple of days, ‘to transact a little piece of business’ he told Cuthbert Hamilton. It may have been on this occasion that he visited Gertrude Stein for the first time. She remembered he was tall and thin and looked like ‘a young frenchman on the rise’ and that ‘his feet were very french, or at least his shoes’:
he came and told all about his quarrel with Roger Fry. Roger Fry had come in not many days before and had already told all about it. They told exactly the same story only it was different, very different.*
If Lewis also mentioned to Miss Stein his irritation with Madame Strindberg that month, she did not record the fact. But according to the letter he wrote Hamilton from Paris, this was another business relationship strained to breaking point. The two artists had collaborated to devise a shadow play for the Cabaret Theatre Club. Ombres Chinoises was performed on 26 October. During the preparations an argument blew up between Hamilton and Madame Strindberg over the black screens necessary for the performance. Apologising for withholding support from his colleague during this ‘bustle’, Lewis showed that where money, or the promise of money, was concerned, he could exercise considerable restraint. Despite the ‘many ridiculous vexations’ of ‘that beastly Cabaret’ he did not wish to alienate the proprietress:
I must still try and get something out of it; I am so hard up, and it serves to fill up the necessary gaps financially . . . – I assure you I was far more exasperated, if anything, than you were, and only held back for that reason, that I knew I should say too much: or rather only did so on the strict promise to myself that if she repeated it I would clear out and leave her ‘en panne’.
This suggests that he had received something for his labours and that necessary financial gaps had been filled by Madame Strindberg. However the balance of his £60, promised so precisely in three instalments, payable by 10 o’clock on 27 September and on 1 and 15 October, had still not materialised. By November his patience was at an end. ‘The Strindberg has broken down my phlegm at last’, he told Hueffer, ‘and I am thinking of writs to regain what is due to me. I have often, for absurd sentimental reasons . . . consented to help her anew. But she is a hard and godless old ape.’
* ‘As to [Omega’s] tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin is “greenery-yallery”, despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies.’
* Stein also recalled: ‘[Lewis] used to come and sit and measure pictures. I can not say that he actually measured with a measuring-rod but he gave all the effect of being in the act of taking very careful measurement of the canvas, the lines within the canvas and everything that might be of use.’ Ernest Hemingway gave a more spiteful version, quoting Stein telling him: ‘I call him “the Measuring Worm” . . . He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb. Sighting on it and measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come right. He’s missed what it’s all about.’ (A Moveable Feast p. 98)