During the first half of March Lewis was fully occupied painting a large portrait of T. S. Eliot. Dressed in a dark business suit and tie, the poet sat with his hands crossed over the bottom buttons of his waistcoat, his elbows resting on the curved wooden arms of the chair. The broad chair back had a slight upward curve behind his head, seeming to accentuate the droop of his shoulders. He stared at a point to the lower left of the painter’s easel. In later years, Lewis would tell people that he always left a bottle of scotch by the chair leg for Eliot to drink while he was sitting. The anecdote would end with Lewis making ‘a little thing’ about having to remember to leave the bottle out of the painting.
Because of Eliot’s busy work schedule at Faber & Faber, sittings had to take place between 8.30 in the evening and midnight, sometimes later.
During the day Lewis worked on the portrait without the sitter. He needed to have it finished by the last week in March if it was going to be considered for inclusion in the 170th Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.
*
At 10 o’clock on the morning of Monday 28 March the 14 members of the Selection Committee met in Gallery III, the largest space Burlington House had to offer. They sat in a shallow arc, the President occupying a winged armchair in the middle. In front of the President was a small round table covered, as tradition dictated, with a green baize cloth on which lay a snuffbox and three large brass letters mounted on turned wooden handles: ‘A’, ‘D’ and ‘X’.
The first painting was carried to a point opposite the President’s table by two white-aproned labourers and rested upright on a squat four-legged stool. A square cushion protected the lower edge of the picture frame and prevented it slipping. Beneath the cushion, the stool had a circular top mounted on an axle, enabling the picture to be turned to face Committee members at either end of the arc. There were also castors fitted to the legs so that stool and picture could, when necessary, be moved in for closer scrutiny.
The foreman of the labourers stood just behind the picture and watched for the President’s signal. After a brisk show of hands the President raised one of the letters and the foreman wrote ‘A’, ‘D’ or ‘X’ on the back of the canvas with a piece of chalk.
The chalking of an ‘A’ was a rare event. A work was only ‘accepted’ by the Selection Committee when there was a unanimous vote in its favour. ‘D’ signified ‘doubtful’ and meant that the work had prompted two or more hands to be raised in its favour and would be looked at again when the Hanging Committee, consisting of nine out of the original fourteen, met the following week. The Hanging Committee would exhibit all works that members had sent in, together with any works by non-members that were chalked with an ‘A’. It would also endeavour to exhibit as many ‘doubtful’ works as possible. Some would eventually be designated ‘doubtful – not hung’, due to lack of space, and the creators of such works might derive a crumb of comfort therefrom. ‘X’, raised by the President and duly chalked by the foreman, denied the artist even that dubious honour: ‘Rejected’.
It can be assumed that a ‘rejected’ work would not have had a single vote in its favour, because there was an informal rule: if one hand were raised in defence, another would second it to make a verdict of ‘doubtful’.
No record of works submitted for consideration is ever preserved apart from statistics in the Academy’s annual report. 11,221 works by non-members arrived at the rear entrance of Burlington House between 25 and 29 March 1938. 9,156 of these were consigned to oblivion by the Selection Committee between 28 and 31 March. Eleven were ‘accepted’. Of the remaining 2,054, chalked ‘doubtful’, that came before the Hanging Committee between 5 and 14 April, 1,266 were exhibited. 777 were ‘doubtful – not hung’.
Among the buff-coloured notifications of rejection sent out in the third week of April was one for Wyndham Lewis.
Sir William Llewellyn, in the last year of his Presidency, had raised the brass ‘X’ and the foreman had scrawled a stigmatic cross on the back of Portrait of T. S. Eliot.
On Thursday 21 April the news broke in the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post:
ROYAL ACADEMY SURPRISE. WORK BY WYNDHAM LEWIS REJECTED
Readers were given a brief description of the spurned painting:
a seated figure, slightly over life-size, with a screen of decorative design in the background. Although the artist is a leader of the more advanced section of the contemporary British school, the Ingres-like proficiency of draughtsmanship which the portrait displays is entirely of academic standard.
The purchase of Red Scene by the Tate Gallery three months before was offered as evidence of the artist’s importance.
Lewis himself was interviewed and his comments appeared in a number of papers the following day. He seems to have enjoyed turning quotable phrases for the journalists. ‘I am voicing the opinion of fellow-artists’, he told the Daily Mail, ‘when I say that the Royal Academy is – if you think this is suitable language – a “foul institution”.’ The Daily Herald ran the headline:
ACADEMY CALLED A ‘FILTH BAZAAR’
In contrast with the spleen he was venting, Lewis was reported as speaking ‘in a quiet, gentle voice . . . “The Royal Academy is a disgusting bazaar in which every sort of filth is accumulated every year.” ’
The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post correspondent contented himself with quoting a more measured line of abuse:
I personally think the Academy does not know what art is. There should be ten competent men on the Selection Committee. Nothing short of radical transformation can possibly do any good. Their selections are all alike – last century impressionism, or coloured photographs which they call portraits. They always select what they think will please the most stupid person. It would be interesting to hear their side of the question, why they rejected my picture, and then ask the opinions of a few impartial judges . . . This was the first time I sent a picture. Its rejection shows that the Academy is prejudiced against present day art.
On the Saturday morning an anonymous Committee member’s reply was printed:
I do not know what Mr Lewis means by present-day art. Art is art in whatever period. It is well known that the Academy is looking anxiously for good modern art. There is so much bad art about. However, we are not here to exhibit experiments, but achievements.
As to why the portrait was rejected, the Committee member observed simply that ‘it was not so good as others that were passed.’
In the meantime, the subject of the portrait himself wrote to Lewis expressing relief at the Selection Committee’s decision:
I am glad to think that a portrait of myself should not appear in an exhibition of the Royal Academy, and I certainly have no desire, now, that my portrait should be painted by any painter whose portrait of me would be accepted by the Royal Academy.
The story would probably not have remained newsworthy into the following week had it not been for a protest from within the Academy’s own ranks. The RA’s Annual Report for 1938 contained a brief summary of the affair and its outcome:
the Council received with regret a letter from Mr A. E. John resigning his Membership owing to the rejection by the Selection Committee of a portrait of Mr T. S. Eliot by Mr Wyndham Lewis. As John had informed the President that he could not alter his decision, the resignation was accepted.
Augustus John, made an Associate in 1921 and Academician in 1928, had written to Lewis on Saturday 23 April: ‘I read yesterday of the rejection of your picture . . . This is the limit and I resign with gratitude to you for affording me so good a reason.’ On the same day he wrote to Llewellyn:
Dear President, After the crowning ineptitude of the rejection of Wyndham Lewis’s picture I feel it is impossible for me to remain longer a member of the R.A. and I am writing to [the Secretary] tendering my resignation. With many personal regrets I remain etc.
Efforts were made at dissuasion but a telegram on the Monday showed him adamant:
VERY SORRY GOING AWAY CANNOT ALTER DECISION – JOHN
The Star interviewed him by telephone for Monday’s Late Special: ‘I very much regret to make a sensation,’ John was quoted as saying:
but it cannot be helped. Nothing that Mr Wyndham Lewis paints is negligible, or to be condemned lightly. I strongly disagree with the rejection. I think it is an inept act on the part of the Academy. A picture by a person of Mr Lewis’s eminence should have been unquestionably exhibited.
Lewis happily stirred the controversy further when The Star reporter approached him for a response:
For a long time I think, Mr John has chafed at Royal Academy action – or inaction, rather . . . I have never discussed this with [him]. I have avoided the subject of the Academy as an indelicate – I might say indecent – subject, a disreputable association that he would prefer to forget. For obviously, Mr John is the only important artist inside the Academy. All the others are outside it. This cannot have been a very comfortable position for him . . . It was indeed a case of a Triton among the minnows or of a lion among the guinea pigs. This resignation . . . should be a mortal blow to the Royal Academy – if it is possible for one to use the expression ‘mortal blow’ with reference to a corpse.
The gloating diatribe continued in the Evening Standard:
The Royal Academy can now be seen in all its gigantic platitude without a single name behind which to shelter. The name of Augustus John was its dazzling alibi. That has been removed. There is no true artist in England who will not be profoundly grateful to Mr John.
The Academy was still not acknowledging the crisis on the following day when an official was invited to comment. ‘All we know is what we have read.’
To keep the story running, Lewis was appointed by The Star as its art critic for a single assignment. Furnished with a press pass he was able to infiltrate the ‘sinister institution’ in Burlington House and attend the private view on Friday 29 April. He was photographed in the courtyard, his back to the main entrance, feet apart and Peterson pipe gripped between his teeth, looking mightily pleased with himself. And his presence did not go unnoticed inside the building. ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis was there for all to see,’ wrote the Daily Mail critic:
massive and inescapable, his huge and dusty felt hat looming in doorways and before gilt frames, his audible comments on various well hung works drawing a crowd of delighted eavesdroppers . . . and the sisters, cousins and aunts of the Academy revolved round him at a polite distance, inquisitive and embarrassed.
He was accompanied on this critical swathe by Hannen Swaffer, art correspondent of the Daily Herald. ‘There is not one here that I would hang on my walls’, he told Swaffer at one point. ‘I came with an open mind.’
As critic of The Star he made his own selection of the works on view. He proved himself far more rigorous than the Committee that had voted down his portrait of Eliot, and a damningly small number of paintings were listed for approval:
I have not shirked my duty as a critic. I have gone through the Royal Academy exhibits with a fine-comb, from gallery to gallery, taking them picture by picture. I find that there are thirty-two exhibits all told, which I can gaze upon without a sensation of uneasiness or without a feeling of the utter vanity of human life. Out of 1,587 exhibits, I am able to pass 32 as fit.
He pointed out that even the 32 were not masterpieces: there was a Lavery ‘reminiscent of Sargent in one of his slick and glittering Venetian interiors’; there was a ‘goodish’ Wilson Steer; there was The Gathering Storm by E. Leslie Budham, ‘an agreeable travel advert – “Go to sunny Cornwall for your holidays.” ’ In order to make the number up to 50 he was prepared to include half a dozen drawings, five of the best official portraits and, as a final makeweight, seven or so by Alfred Munnings. ‘They would all go comfortably into Gallery one. The remaining Galleries could be used as dance halls; as reading and rest rooms; lecture rooms, or ice rinks.’ He also thought that the bar laid on for the private view should be made a permanent fixture. ‘I could never have written this [article] without the timely refreshment offered me by the R.A.’
The review was accompanied by a reproduction of the painting that had excited sufficient comment to be dubbed by the press ‘Picture of the Year’. Needless to say this monumental and topical treatment of summary execution by firing squad, called In their own Home (Spain’s Agony of Civil War 1936–1938) by Russell Flint RA, was not included in Lewis’s selection of 32:
Gallery Two contains . . . a genuine atrocity . . . Since it has a political, and, therefore, serious subject matter, it is all the more unfortunate that it should, with its studio-peasants posed against a wall, fail in moving the spectator to indignation at the ‘Desastres de la Guerra’, because of the so much more obvious disaster it records in the mere matter of technical tact.
Flint was the only member of the 1938 Selection Committee whose work was singled out by The Star critic for especial malevolence.
‘What I Think of the R.A.’ appeared on Saturday 30 April. That evening the Academy held its Annual Banquet. Huddersfield Town had lost 1–0 to Preston North End in the FA Cup Final at the Empire Stadium in Wembley and northern soccer supporters joined the crowds in Piccadilly to watch the dignitaries arrive at Burlington House. A guard of honour of the Artists Rifles was inspected in the courtyard by the Earl of Athlone. The guests included the Belgian, Chilean, Chinese, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Soviet and Turkish Ambassadors, the High Commissioners for Canada, South Africa and Eire. There were representatives of the Church, the Armed Services and the Government.
The Prime Minister responded when Sir William Llewellyn toasted ‘His Majesty’s Ministers’ and it was clear that the controversies of the previous ten days had not escaped Neville Chamberlain’s notice:
You can imagine . . . what a relief it is to be able to turn away from the hurly-burly of the House of Commons and enter into the tranquil atmosphere of art, where such things as resignations are unknown . . .
There was laughter at the ponderous irony.
. . . where artists, like little birds in their nests, agree. If there was any suspicion of this enviable harmony being in danger of being disturbed, I should like you to remember that the Government is still pledged to a policy of non-intervention.
There was more laughter at this. It was a good joke. Only two days before, the Prime Minister had maintained his government’s policy of nonintervention and rejected M. Daladier’s call for joint Anglo-French action against the German threat to Czechoslovakia.
At 9.45 on that Saturday evening, had he switched on the wireless and tuned to the BBC’s National Programme, Lewis would have heard Mr Winston Churchill MP, direct from Burlington House, propose a toast to ‘The Royal Academy of Art’. He would have heard that institution warmly approved for the orthodoxy he so despised – an orthodoxy he must have been well aware of when he delivered his portrait of T. S. Eliot to the Burlington Gardens back entrance in March. He would have heard those who challenged that orthodoxy dismissed by Churchill as ‘highmettled palfreys prancing and pawing, sniffing, snorting, foaming, and occasionally kicking, and shying at every puddle they see’. He would have heard the complacent laughter from assembled guests and Academicians. He would have heard the future Honorary Academician Extraordinary go on to speak in sonorous tones of ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ and he might have been amused or insulted, with equal justification, by a veiled reference to himself as a fledgling of the Arts:
The country possesses in the Royal Academy an institution of wealth and power for the purpose of encouraging the arts of painting and sculpture . . . The function of such an institution . . . is to hold a middle course between tradition and innovation. Without tradition art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation it is a corpse. Innovation, of course, involves experiment. Experiments may or may not be fruitful . . . There are many opportunities and many places for experimental artists to try their wings – and it is not until the results of their experiments have won a certain measure of acceptance from the general agreement of qualified judges that the Royal Academy can be expected to give them its countenance.
Following the clapping and cheers, and the President’s reply, the broadcast from Burlington House came to an end at 10.15 and the BBC Theatre Orchestra took over that evening’s wireless entertainment.
The Art Establishment had closed its ranks against disturbing outside influences. The ten-day sensation of the ‘Rejected Portrait’ was over bar the grumbling of a letter or two to The Times. Lewis made a belated reply the following Wednesday but it was clear which side had won:
The ‘controversy’ regarding the Royal Academy has been decorously interred . . . by oratory at a public banquet . . . Even the most resounding denunciations poured forth by mere artists, however famous, will just roll like water off the back of the proverbial duck, so long as next minute an eminent ex-Minister of State can be found to turn on the . . . romantic Parliamentary rhetoric.
*
The year had started with the portrait of one American poet. It ended with the portrait of another. When Olivia Shakespear fell ill in early October, a telegram brought her son-in-law, Ezra Pound, from holiday in Venice. By the time he reached London she was dead, and he stayed on through November to settle her affairs. He also presented himself at 29A Notting Hill Gate to be painted. He ‘swaggered in, coat-tails flying, a malacca cane out of the ‘nineties aslant beneath his arm, the lion’s head from the Scandinavian north-west thrown back. There was no conversation. He flung himself at full length into [Lewis’s] best chair . . . closed his eyes and was motionless.’
‘And now, mon, fire away!’ the great Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle is said to have grunted at Whistler in 1872, as he took up the pose for the portrait called Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2. Pound may have had this anecdote in mind as he settled himself into the armchair:
‘Go to it Wyndham!’ he gruffled without opening his eyes, as soon as his mane of as yet entirely ungrizzled hair had adjusted itself to the cushioned chair-top.
During that first sitting Pound did not move for two hours, nor did he sleep. But as work progressed the relaxed pose caused him to doze off occasionally, and measures had to be taken to keep him alert. Ruthven Todd remembered being telephoned by Lewis:
Are you free this afternoon? Good. I’m painting a portrait, and he will fall asleep, and I need to have someone to irritate him. Come about two.
Todd was disappointed in Pound. He had wanted to talk about the structure of The Cantos but was treated instead to a lecture on economics and a eulogy of Mussolini’s Italy which included the assertion, apparently made without a trace of irony, ‘At least the trains run to time.’
Pound’s collapsed pose dictated the disposition of canvas to easel and ensured that he be presented to the world ‘landscape’ instead of ‘portrait’. It also suggested the simple geometry of the composition. An imaginary line taken along the ridge of Pound’s nose, extending forwards to the bottom left corner and backwards to the upper right, divided the oblong picture surface in half. Apart from a small section of forehead and hair, the poet’s likeness was confined below this diagonal.
By the time the sitter returned to Italy at the beginning of December, work was sufficiently advanced to excite enthusiastic comment from visitors to Lewis’s studio. Lord Carlow thought it his best portrait to date. Hugh Gordon Porteus and Michael Cullis, collectively ‘the portcullises’, were impressed, and E.W.F. Tomlin and his wife ‘tittered approval’. Lewis himself assured Pound: ‘It is very good.’
But there was an obvious and fundamental problem about the composition that he explained by diagram in a letter that followed Pound to Rapallo. The diagonally split rectangle consisted of two equal right-angled triangles. The cross-hatched lower triangle showed the half of canvas occupied by the picture’s subject. The upper triangle, what Pound called ‘that thaaar north west corner’, contained only a question mark.
During the 1930s, Lewis had developed a repertoire of solutions to such spatial problems.
The portrait of Mrs T. J. Honeyman, painted 1936–7, is roughly composed as a reversed ‘L’ shape: chair back, head and torso are vertical and slightly off centre, chair arm and crossed leg horizontal. In such an arrangement, something always has to be found to occupy the open part of the ‘L’. To the left of Mrs Honeyman, between chair back and draped chair arm, is something that can best be described as an abstract doodle. Brightly coloured and fantastic, its sole purpose is to fill an otherwise empty space.
In the centrally aligned vertical composition of the Eliot portrait there are two spaces, to right and left, filled with coloured arabesques, although the area behind the sitter’s head was left uncharacteristically blank.
Rarely does a subject dominate the rectangle sufficiently to make such space-fillers redundant. Even in the 1938 portrait of John McLeod, whose spectacularly long legs seem folded up in a violent and vain attempt to cram everything in, there was still a small area to the right of the head that Lewis thought necessary to plug with the picture of a kasbah.
But in no other composition was Lewis faced with such a dauntingly large area as that which yawned above the restful slanting figure of Pound. Clearly something more than a colourful abstract flourish was required. And, powerful as the portrait was, there was a risk that whatever was put into that triangular expanse of canvas might detract from it. By February the problem had been solved. Lewis decided that the leonine head was strong enough to fight its own battle for attention against a nature morte, taking up over half the total width of the canvas.
On top of the low round writing table, with its still lower round shelf, lay a clutter of studio properties familiar from other portraits of the time: the heavy bulbous glass ashtray, the ornamental rectangular plate with scalloped edges decorated with ‘Sailor’s Farewell’,* and a sheaf of newspapers. Three Gothic letters from the Manchester Guardian’s masthead are visible at a fold. The only unfamiliar object is a blue and white piece of porcelain chinoiserie.
‘Tonight’, Lewis told Pound on 10 March, ‘by rotary photogravure your image will be stamped out one million eight hundred thousand times.’ This mechanical proliferation was preparation for an issue of Picture Post two weeks hence. Pound’s portrait was reproduced in colour, part of a display of nine plates illustrating John Rothenstein’s article on Lewis: ‘Great British Masters – 26’. Augustus John had been the subject of ‘Great British Masters – 25’ and John Nash would be the 27th the following week.
The caption in Picture Post described it as ‘only just finished’, but the painting was not, in fact, quite complete. Lewis had yet to paint the planes which were to break up and help differentiate the background: the dark brown section of floor boards and gradated grey wall to the left, the double row of nail heads defining the wash of pale green and ochre to the right as an area of painted canvas.
But even when the painter set it aside as complete, a roughness remained. Of the poet’s clothes, only the loose Byronic collar has any linear definition. The jacket, tie and waistcoat are barely differentiated in a black, cloudlike billow, thinly and raggedly painted with patches of untouched canvas showing through it. The amorphous body, sloping up from the lower left, has the effect of focusing attention on the precisely modelled head, jammed into the top right corner.
John Rothenstein, appointed Director of the Tate only the year before, had watched the portrait of Pound develop ‘with growing admiration’ and, although regarding it as ‘lacking quite the force and precision of a drawing of the same subject made some eighteen years before’, promised Lewis that he would bring it before the next Trustees’ committee meeting with a view to buying it for the gallery.
* Sweet, oh Sweet is that Sensation,
Where two hearts in union meet:
But the pain of Separation,
Mingles bitter with the Sweet.