Number 2, Alma Studios, at a rental of £125 per annum, a premium of £125 for fixtures and lease and a further £50 in rates and taxes on top of that, ‘was at least twice as expensive as [he] could afford.’ The building still stands. Studio 2 is a huge first-floor room with an enormous arched north-facing expanse of glass occupying nearly the entire wall and overlooking Stratford Road, off Earls Court Road. Entrance and stairs are around the corner in Radley Mews.
In addition to the rent, premium, rates and taxes, Lewis spent a further £35.14s. on essential studio furnishing:
matting |
£3.10s. |
adjustable drawing desk |
£9.10s. |
easel |
£6.10s. |
large mirror |
£5.5s. |
portfolio stand |
£2.2s. |
plan chest for drawings |
£1 |
model’s throne |
£5 |
trestle table for paints |
£2.2s. |
studio table |
15s. |
He moved in on 7 October and Sydney Schiff lent assistance in the form of his servant, John Cook. ‘You must tell him clearly what you want him to do’, the man’s master told Lewis. ‘I shan’t need him here till 7 o’clock and he can go tomorrow again if you find him any use.’
Lewis told the Income Tax authorities, for whose benefit the itemised list of expenses was prepared, that he began painting regularly in November, ‘the settling in done with’.
He also claimed that, while attending to the sale of his mother’s laundry business, finally disposed of in February:
my work as artist [was] so much interfered with that [I] could do very little of any use. Much ground [was] lost. [It] jeopardised my chances in my career as a painter and held up my work.
Be that as it may, by April 1921 he had succeeded in producing an impressive body of drawings and canvases for his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.
Iris Barry figured in a number of the works, her thick dark eyebrows emphasised, often at the expense of her eyes. Lewis drew her frequently in a distinctive dress that especially appealed to him: very dark with a plain V-shaped neckline and long sleeves ending in two light bands at the cuffs. The skirt was a complex affair, incorporating an underskirt of the same material, hanging lower than the outer one and decorated with three broad bands matching the two on the cuffs. Sometimes she wore a wrapover waistcoat, fastening on the right, and sometimes a red tam o’shanter. But it was the heavy eyebrows, and stripes at wrist and calf, that most often serve to identify her.
A canvas, some three feet by five, showed the most impressive variation on the theme. Arising from the dark carapace of that familiar costume, her neck and impassive face were modelled in shades of blue steel, faceted like overlapping splinters of razor blade. The full lower lip was a startling blood-red crescent, while the dead irises of the eyes, under hooded metallic lids, were bright yellow. The folds of the sleeves lay in zigzag ridges, points and crests, highlighted dark green. Curled in the lap, the right hand was a shining prosthetic claw. Lower down, between the dual hems of the complex skirt, the curving parallel bands glowed bronze. An armchair, recognisable from other portraits of the time, seemed transformed and expanded to contain the monumental figure.
The title of the painting was in keeping with its sculptural formality. ‘ “Praxitella” is all you say it is,’ he wrote to Jessica Dismorr. ‘The reason I don’t do more such work is that . . . one needs the courage of seventeen buffaloes to work . . . [in] the conditions we live under: . . . I only have the courage of about ten. But perhaps my herd will increase.’
Another sitter was the youngest daughter of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and niece to Max Beerbohm. When Iris Tree posed for Lewis her marriage to Curtis Moffat was about a year old. Her golden bobbed hair became an icon for a number of artists, including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. When Jacob Epstein sculpted her in bronze, he left the face patinated but burnished the helmet of hair to a mirror-like shine. Lewis exhibited a number of drawings of her in April, together with a large portrait in oils.
It is not known when she and Lewis had an affair, nor how long it lasted. However, by the time his various painted and pencilled appraisals of her features appeared on the walls of the Leicester Galleries, she was referring to the liaison ruefully as a thing of the past:
We have never had any peace of mind, ripe tasty hours together Lewis, except those stolen from my domestic cupboard, leaving a skeleton there at that.*
When the show was being hung Max Beerbohm came into the gallery and Oliver Brown, the director, showed him around while Lewis hovered nearby. Beerbohm looked solemnly at the portrait of his niece languishing in a capacious armchair. Her knees were drawn up at a sharp angle and her elbow formed another sharp angle on the arm of the chair. Lewis asked him what he thought of it. ‘It has its points’, came the reply.
If Lewis’s brief intimacy with Iris Tree had been unsatisfactory, her portrait lacked resolution as well. ‘If I sell it in the show,’ he told Quinn, ‘I shall insist in any case on having another week’s work on it. But I consider it inferior to most of the other things there.’
Apart from the portraits and figure studies that made up the bulk of the exhibition, five garishly coloured paintings contained outlandish grinning men with jagged hats, scalpel-bladed features and teeth like piano keys. ‘A Tyro’, Lewis explained in the Daily Express:
is a new type of human animal like Harlequin or Punchinello – a new and sufficiently elastic form or ‘mould’ into which one can translate the satirical observations that are . . . awakened by one’s race . . . The Tyro . . . is raw and undeveloped; his vitality is immense, but purposeless, and hence sometimes malignant. His keynote, however, is vacuity; he is an animated, but artificial puppet, a ‘novice’ to real life.
Adorned with ink renderings of these jarring creatures, the first issue of the new paper, The Tyro, appeared in time for the private view. Publication took place despite the fact that Lewis had withdrawn his £50 stake in the enterprise, pleading pressing financial considerations.
*
Square, white invitation cards were sent out:
Paintings and Drawings
by
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Messrs. Ernest Brown and Phillips request the pleasure of your Company at the Private View of the Exhibition on Saturday, 9th April.
THE LEICESTER GALLERIES
Leicester Square, London
10 till 6
The former Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, was among the first to arrive and was presented with the first copy of The Tyro. On leaving he was heard to say: ‘This man is one of the finest draughtsmen we have!’ The critic from The Spectator appeared to agree but was correspondingly disparaging about the paintings:
The point might . . . be raised whether Mr Wyndham Lewis should ever use oil paint. It is a medium for which he seems to have little capacity and no sympathy, as may be seen in the large portrait of Miss Iris Tree. The first effect of a picture ought not to be to raise in our subconsciousness the complex of ‘Wet Paint!’ Really Mr Wyndham Lewis is a draughtsman, and his natural means of expression line.
The portrait did not sell, and Lewis eventually painted it out to reuse the canvas.
Forty-five paintings and drawings were listed in the catalogue and 18 sold during the exhibition’s month-long run. There were also six ex-catalogue works sold. This amounted to a total of £616 1s. When the Gallery’s 33 per cent commission had been deducted, Lewis would have received about £413.
Edward Wadsworth, having just come into a substantial inheritance, bought Praxitella for £200 and Sydney Schiff spent a total of £100 on six works, including Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. When Richard Wyndham and his young wife visited the Schiffs with their nine-month-old baby, the infant was traumatised by this hatchet-hatted, leering self-portrait on its bright yellow background. Violet Schiff reported that he started screaming ‘but kept on turning his head to look at it as though he were attracted but terrified’.
It was a reaction shared by some adults. Virginia Woolf wrote that her sister and Fry were sneaking glances at Lewis’s new magazine: ‘Roger and Nessa read him in shops, and won’t buy him – which . . . proves that they fear him.’
‘Tyros and Portraits’ did not markedly improve Lewis’s financial position. 2 Alma Studios was a considerable burden. ‘I have to leave this studio at once,’ he told Dismorr in April, ‘and seek a cheaper one. But even then I don’t see how I am going to get along with enough comfort to live.’ But it would be another four months before he was finally forced out.
*
In an effort to sell work he went to Paris later that month, taking 60 copies of The Tyro with him. He renewed his acquaintanceship with Joyce, lectured him about Chinese art and told him that he found life in London very depressing.
‘Had several uproarious allnight sittings (and dancings) with Lewis’, Joyce reported to Frank Budgen, ‘I like him.’ They drank at the Bar Gitane near the Panthéon in the company of two local prostitutes who were kept supplied with drink but for the most part ignored. ‘Remember you are the author of The Ideal Giant’, Joyce reminded Lewis on one occasion when he overstepped decorous bounds with one of the women.
Lewis shocked the straitlaced Harriet Shaw Weaver by telling her that Joyce had drunk with him until dawn, had ended up dancing by himself, and had finally picked up the bar bill for the assembled company. Joyce still insisted upon paying for everything with money he could ill afford. Pride, moreover, was compounded with rivalry, as he invariably attempted to outdo Lewis in alcoholic consumption. But the author of The Ideal Giant was more than just a drinking rival.
‘I’ll never forget the feeling of water rushing round my arse during a thunderstorm in Paris’, Lewis told Ruthven Todd at a party in the late 1930s, torrential rain falling outside. ‘I was sitting in a gutter with Joyce. He was terrified of thunderstorms, you know? We were discussing the matter of our illegitimate children . . .’ But at that moment Lewis was called away to talk to somebody else and Todd was left with only this tantalising opening of the anecdote. The story had evidently been told elsewhere because after the war, in St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC, Ezra Pound recalled one further detail. It was a remark made on that stormy night which betrayed Joyce’s insecurity in the company of other writers – an insecurity which may have accounted for his aloofness towards ‘Mr Eliot’ the previous summer. With the painter, however, he felt at ease, so long as Lewis restricted his activities to the medium of pencil or brush.
Sitting there in the rain with the water guttering around their boots and buttocks, Joyce had said to Lewis: ‘You may paint this but I will write it.’
Lewis left Paris on the night of 30 May. ‘My journey has been, from a business point of view, a complete failure’, he told Iris Barry. However, when he wrote to Quinn a couple of days after his return, he seemed more optimistic. He intended taking a small cheap studio in London and ‘a similar pied-à-terre in Paris’. He would then divide his time between the two, having a Paris dealer to take all the ‘experimental stuff’ that would not sell in London. Nothing came of this plan.
*
In July he prepared a statement of earnings and expenditure for the Income Tax Inspector. Because he had rented his studio in September 1920 he suggested taking September to September as his current year of work. ‘We are now at July 20’, he declared, ‘and it is unlikely until next September that I shall sell any work, the Summer being a bad time.’ His total studio expenses to date, at ‘a rough estimate and certainly below the mark’, amounted to £395.14s. His total income from painting and drawing came to £450, giving him a profit of £54.6s.
He had other expenses. Since his mother’s death he had Mrs Prickett to support, together with Olive Johnson’s two children who were now in her care. There was also 27/- a week to be found for Maisie’s keep at the Home in Sudbury. He bought an outfit of clothes for Iris Barry, enabling her to secure a position at Bertry’s of New Bond Street, purveyors of silk and woollen haute couture. This investment in her professional future was doubtless intended as a first step towards making her financially independent of him.
It should not be forgotten, however, that only the previous year Lewis had received a considerable amount of money from the sale of his father’s property in Southport, not to mention the undisclosed sum he realised on the sale of his mother’s business in February. What happened to this capital remains a mystery. It is difficult to believe that, even with twice the number of illegitimate children to support, he could have so efficiently exhausted his inheritance in such a short time. Be that as it may, in early August, no longer able to pay his rent, he was finally forced to leave Alma Studios. And even the ignominious removal of his furniture into storage was not without expense. ‘The little margin that I expected to have went in moving’, he told Barry. ‘The men had to come three days running; lots of things had to be settled up of which I had kept no count.’ For the time being homeless, he found temporary lodging with a friend, Bernard Rowland, at 16A Craven Road, Paddington.
*
At 8.30 one evening in mid-August Lewis made a delivery to a house on the eastern edge of Regent’s Park. He left a note: ‘I . . . paid call, but found you out. Left last parcel of effects asked for.’
It is not known precisely when he and Iris Barry separated, nor how long she had been living at 8 Stanhope Terrace when he dropped off the rest of her belongings. ‘I wanted to see you’, he told her, ‘but I am afraid that will not be possible now, as I shall be off tomorrow or following day . . . I will try to send £2 during ensuing week.’
She was earning £3 a week at Bertry’s but was still dependent on Lewis for the money she had to send each week to Sudbury. The invariable lateness of these payments, and the necessity of constant reminders, was to set the wrangling tone of their correspondence for many months to come. The news that he was leaving for ‘a short holiday’, naturally provoked accusations of extravagance which he was quick to refute. ‘The fare 2nd class, via Ostend, to Berlin is £4.7.6,’ he told her, ‘about the same as it is to Cornwall.’ Rocketing German inflation in the postwar period was also advantageous to the English tourist of modest means. In August 1921 the exchange rate of the mark was 350 to the pound. Before the war it had stood at 20. ‘Therefore’, he explained, ‘once I get there I could not be in a cheaper place. So much for the costly appearance of my holiday.’ He also reminded her that he was going to Berlin to try to sell work.
By late August he was stuck in Brussels, ‘because of hitch in my money arrangements’, he explained, and for a time thought he would be unable to continue his journey. He was exasperated, stranded as he was, that Iris’s demands pursued him even there. ‘Your letter has been forwarded to me’, he replied:
I have enough money to take me to the place I propose going to, and back, and enough to buy an occasional cheap cigar, and that’s all . . . You must absolutely cease to regard me as a portion of Providence.
And if she accused him of extravagance, he was prepared to retaliate in kind:
it came to my notice that you contemplate, in a week or two, a large addition to your wardrobe. I suggest that if you have such money to spend, you should first spend it in meeting the arrears for Sudbury.
He did not explain how her forthcoming expenditure had come to his notice, but he touched upon this ignoble theme some days later:
I repeat that the acquisition of handsome clothes hardly indicates the work house.
And he returned to it again on 1 September:
If I make some money in Berlin, I will send you some at once. I am taking you at your word as regards your situation, in spite of projected wardrobes, etc.
On the 2 September, after four days kicking his heels in ‘this dull town’, he managed to extricate himself from Brussels and travelled on to Berlin.
Lewis had been in correspondence with Herwarth Walden, editor of the Expressionist journal Der Sturm, and had even promised to let him have four pictures for an exhibition being organised in Paris in April. Whether he did, however, is uncertain, because his own show was running at the Leicester Galleries for the same month and he told Schiff he did not think he would have much left over worth sending. Establishing further contact with Walden, and perhaps negotiating an exhibition at his Sturm Galerie in the Potsdamerstrasse, was probably the main objective of this, Lewis’s first visit to Berlin. On his arrival he was invited to tea and introduced to other artists. Ivan Puni, ‘an ex-Communist, lately arrived from Petrograd’, had a beautiful dark-haired wife who Lewis claimed ‘could ogle a man until he was sick’. He also met Alexander Archipenko, the Russian sculptor: ‘getting worse every day’, Lewis thought, particularly repelled by ‘a nasty thing of his’ in Walden’s possession.
He seemed not especially impressed with the great promoter of modern German art. ‘Walden and his pictures’, he reported to Violet Schiff, ‘do not compare favourably, I think, with Paris dealers. As to the stuff he has all over his walls, it is like a rather dashing London Group show.’ There was also a financial consideration. If the extraordinary German exchange rate favoured the tourist, ‘any business dealings with Walden or another [were] out of the question for anyone coming from the West.’ He was amiably received, however, and thought he might, later on, have an exhibition there.
Rowan Walker of the Daily Express may have suggested that Lewis write something about his visit for the paper. Lewis did not do so and seemed rather disappointed at not seeing half the fabled ‘vice’ of Berlin that Lord Beaverbrook had observed. It was to be another nine years before Lewis would succumb to ‘journalistic inspiration’ and write of the city’s vice, and, more damagingly for his future reputation, its politics.
*
Three weeks later, having stopped off for a few days in Paris, he was back in London and searching for a cheap studio. Bernard Rowland’s place at 16A Craven Road remained his temporary address for another two months. In mid-October he moved into a studio, the rental on which, at £75 per annum, was considerably less than he had paid for the splendid airy accommodation in Stratford Road. Lee Studio was an altogether more humble workplace. Virginia Woolf reported to Roger Fry: ‘Lewis now paints in a shed behind a curtain – rites are gone through before you enter.’
A decade before, in 1911, the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department of the Royal Borough of Kensington had granted planning permission to the painter John Brakewell (‘Brake’) Baldwin to have a temporary studio building erected in the long garden at the rear of his house, Number 6 Phillimore Terrace, in Allen Street. In order to give him the maximum working space possible, it was to be a tight fit. The plans allowed for a foot on one side, barely six inches on the other, separating it from the two party walls which stretched to the bottom of the garden.
Three weeks after the granting of planning permission, the temporary studio had been completed, inspected and allowed to be retained in the garden for three years. It was inspected again in July 1914 and found to be in good order and as originally constructed. It was therefore allowed to be retained for a further three years.
‘Brake’ Baldwin did not have the use of his studio for long. He died of a heart attack, at the age of 30, in 1915. Thereafter his widow made the three-yearly applications for retention. It was still ‘in good order and as originally constructed’ when Wyndham Lewis rented it from Mrs Baldwin in late 1921.
According to Edith Sitwell, the garden was ‘an area of waste ground (rather like a deserted cemetery) haunted by hens scratching the ground and themselves and squawking desolately and phonetically.’
The studio was 17 feet wide, 29 feet long and 16 feet high. It was mounted on concrete blocks, roofed in patent ‘Eternit’ slates, and the exterior walls were clad in corrugated iron sheets. Inside, walls and ceiling were of tongue-and-groove planks. A ten-foot-square window rose from a point level with the top of the garden wall to the full height of the roof and faced across the other back gardens of Phillimore Terrace, in the direction of Kensington High Street. Panes of obscured glass ensured privacy and an even north light.
Because it cut off the top of the garden nearest the house from the bottom part with its high wall and back gate opening into Adam and Eve Mews, there were doors at either end of the studio allowing access from both directions. Lewis had exclusive use of the back gate and could come and go unobserved by his landlady. He would have kept the studio door facing Mrs Baldwin’s house permanently locked from the inside.
In December he was able to move out of Rowland’s flat and into a room at 5 Shaftesbury Villas in Allen Street. It was two minutes’ walk from his studio in Adam and Eve Mews.
* A number of letters from Iris Tree to Lewis, this one amongst them, were mistakenly ascribed to Iris Barry when first catalogued at Cornell.