‘Doing What Nature Does’: Laurence Binyon and Transcendence

in the Work of Wyndham Lewis c.1910-1915

Jonathan Shirland

Bridgewater State University

In Canto 80 Ezra Pound declared that, ‘it is to Mr Binyon that I owe, initially, Mr Lewis,

Mr P. Wyndham Lewis. His bull-dog, me, as it were against old Sturge M’s bull-dog’. 1

The two bull-dogs, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, are the two central figures behind

Vorticism, widely considered the only truly avant-garde art movement in Britain before

World War One. Their two early masters, Laurence Binyon and Thomas Sturge Moore,

were members of the ‘British Museum Circle’, a loose group of Edwardian writers and

artists who facilitated Pound and Lewis’s establishment in the London art world. 2 The

connections between late Victorian (especially late Romantic) and early Modernist

culture in Britain have been subject to increasing scholarly attention in the past fifteen

years, particularly in the influential work of David Peters Corbett, as art historians revise

their understanding of this transitional pre-war period.3 Nevertheless, Binyon’s role in the

development of Lewis’s art remains obscured by the wide array of other thinkers seen to

have influenced him before World War One, including Henri Bergson, T.E. Hulme,

Wilhelm Worringer, Georges Sorel, and Frederic Nietzsche.4

Binyon introduced Pound and Lewis to one another and was an important late-

Romantic poet, but he built his career and reputation as a pioneering scholar and curator

1
of Oriental art.5 He was responsible for building up the Oriental Art Collections of the

British Museum from the early 1890s onwards, and Lewis studied with him in the print

room from 1899-1901.6 Binyon’s numerous publications and public lectures shaped

British responses to the arts of Asia and remain important for their nuanced engagement

with the philosophies behind Chinese and Japanese art. Binyon’s interpretation of Asian

1
Quoted in David Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art 1914-1930 (Manchester University Press:

Manchester and New York, 1997), p. 27.

2
For an analysis of Lewis’s relationship to this older generation of artists see Timothy Materer, ‘Lewis and

the Patriarchs: Augustus John, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Sturge Moore’, in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), Wyndham

Lewis: A Re-evaluation (Athlone Press: London, 1980) pp. 47-64.

3
See in particular in Peters Corbett, Modernity, and David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art

and Visuality in England, 1848-1914 (Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 2004)
4
See for example, Thomas Kush, Wyndham Lewis’s Pictorial Integer (UMI Research Press: Ann Arbor,

Michigan, 1981), Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror Up to Politics

(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993), David Wragg, Wyndham Lewis and the Philosophy of Art

in Early Modernist Britain: Creating a Political Aesthetic (Edwin Mellen Press: Lewiston, NY, 2005), Paul

Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2000), and

Paul Edwards, ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism: A Strange Synthesis’, in Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene

(eds.), The Vorticists: Manifesto For a Modern World (Tate Publishing: London, 2010)
5
Lewis was a regular visitor at the British Museum Circle meetings at the Vienna Café in New Oxford

Street, writing fondly of these occasions in Blasting and Bombardiering. He was also an admirer of

Binyon’s poetry in his youth. He asked his mother to send him copies of Binyon’s Odes and Porphyrion in

1907. See John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Clarendon Press: Oxford,

1995) p. 64. Pound met Binyon on February 5 1909, having attended his lectures on ‘Art and Thought in

East and West’ in March 1907 in the small theatre at the Albert Hall.
6
Binyon started work at the British Museum in 1893, transferring to the Department of Prints and

Drawings in 1895. For an examination of Binyon’s role in expanding the Chinese art holdings of the British

2
art’s engagements with self-transcendence through effecting a union with the underlying

workings of nature influenced Lewis’s efforts to manage self-investment at the level of

the picture surface at a moment when he was rejecting prevalent notions of self-

expression in art, yet remained unwilling to renounce altogether any potential spirituality

in Modernist endeavour. As a result, exposure to Japanese and Chinese art contributed to

the development of British Modernism in a more nuanced way than is often appreciated. 7

An analysis of this connection serves as a response to Paul Edwards’s call in the

catalogue accompanying the Tate Gallery’s 2011 exhibition The Vorticists: Manifesto

For a Modern World for studies to address Lewis’s, ‘interest in oriental art and its

aesthetic’ and conforms to Lewis’s own 1929 definition of Vorticism as a ‘strange

synthesis of cultures and times … the first projection of a world-art’. 8 It also serves as a

counter to prevailing conceptions of Lewis’s art as wholly devoid of a concern with

spiritual (self)expression, most prominently the arguments of Hal Foster.9

The works Lewis exhibited between 1910 and 1915 puzzled critics. They were

described as ‘vexatious diagrams’, ‘geometrical experiments’ and ‘bad practical jokes’. 10

Nonetheless, the complexity of their designs at least gave pause for thought. As The

Times wrote when Lewis exhibited Kermesse at the Albert Hall in 1912, although the

work was ‘not intelligible’, ‘we are persuaded that the artist means something by it. There

is rhythm which leads us to believe that the sense is obscure not wanting.’ 11 The Daily

Mail could also respond positively if the works were accepted purely as designs: ‘facts

and representation must be forgotten in the contemplation of a very beautiful design that

Museum, see Michelle Ying-Ling Huang, ‘British Interest in Chinese Painting 1881-1910: The Anderson

and Wegener collections of Chinese painting at the British Museum’, Journal of the History of Collections,

vol. 22, No. 2, 2010, pp. 279-287.

3
aims at a more or less abstract rhythm of colour, form and movement … It would be easy

to poke fun at many of the exhibits, but it would be foolish to deny the vitality of the

movement’.12 However, this enforced critical concentration on technical description and

‘obscure rhythm’ led many reviewers to conclude that Lewis's pictures fell short of

actually being artworks. The Daily Telegraph in 1913 was concise: ‘Three Women, is not

a picture, hardly indeed a work of art at all, but it is a very powerful design of its kind’. 13

The Times also cautioned that, ‘this geometrical art needs great beauty of material, as in

mosaic or stained glass, or else a strong emotion to carry it off. Without either or both of

these it is merely diagrammatic’. 14 The trouble was that Lewis’s works were seen by

many viewers to be ‘without’ both ‘strong emotion’ and ‘beauty of material’. Indeed, his

surfaces short-circuited prevailing assumptions about what constituted artistic self-

investment, leading to criticisms that his works lacked personal feeling. 15 For example,

his tendency to bind figure and ground emphasized the flatness of his works at a time

when other artists were being celebrated for their frank materiality. In 1919, he wrote of

7
The period 1907-1914 was important for the growth in interest in Asian art in London, including the

British Museum’s exhibition of Chinese and Japanese art that ran until 1912. See Zhaoming Qian, The

Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (University of Virginia Press: Charlottesville,

VA, 2003) pp. 3-9.

8
Edwards, ‘Strange Synthesis’, p. 36.
9
Emphasising the influence of Worringer and Hulme, Foster believes Lewis’s art was as an effort to

‘imagine a new ego that can withstand the shocks of the military-industrial, the modern urban, and the

mass-political, indeed, that can forge these stimuli into a protective shield’, and interprets his Vorticist

works as reflecting this desire to harden and armour the bodily ego from within and without to prevent any

dispersal or discharge. See Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods, (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006), pp.

109-150.

4
Walter Sickert that, ‘a slight shudder would convulse him’ when he thought of the

‘brown worm of paint that was wriggling onto the palette … dirty painting was the mark

of the devil’.16 Hugh Kenner emphasizes his ‘nearly Manichean distaste for matter’, and

how his use of geometric systems of lines resulted in, ‘form returning to its matrix, pure

design’.17 Lewis’s use of colour further distanced viewers, vacillating between cold blues

and greys to acidic oranges and pinks. In each case there is a dissonance in their

combination that agitates rather than induces visual pleasure. In Blast 1 Lewis asserted

that, ‘the possibilities of colour, exploitation of discords, odious combinations, etc., have

been little exploited’.18 His surfaces often seem to exhibit a peculiar deadness despite the

dynamism of the designs because of the scarcity of indexical traces, lack of impasto, and

taught precision of his lines.

Lewis's deadpan application is reinforced by the lack of humanist depth in his

treatment of human figures. The Daily Telegraph described them on December 17 1912

as ‘a synthetic suggestion of terpsichorean gyrations…a tragedy in the insect world’, and

The Star argued that they 'belong in the zoo or Madame Tussaud's', either location

denoting Lewis’s dehumanising of them. Lewis's Vorticist planes seem more violent than

the Cubist handling that inspired them; instead of interlocking, they cut across each other,

binding the figures they surround. Further, Lewis's use of grimy blue and black shading

on his figures often resembles bruising, as if Lewis has injured them with his strokes of

pen or brush. In The Vorticist (Fig. 1) there is a sense of the figure futilely struggling for

escape from the angular contours of the environment pressing upon him, highlighted by

the awkward arm position and the enforced curvature of the back. Both iconographically

and stylistically there is a refutation of interiority, an aesthetic Lewis advanced in his

5
novel Tarr; art should, ‘have no inside, nothing you cannot see … living soullessly and

deadly by its frontal lines and masses’, and again, ‘deadness is the first condition of art:

the second is the absence of soul in the human and sentimental sense’.19

Paul Edwards has traced in great detail Lewis's anti-romantic tendencies, notably

in the ‘Wild Body’ stories about the rituals of peasant life that he observed during his

student travels on the continent. 20 In his early figural drawings such as Two Figures and

Figure Holding a Flower (both 1912) one can discern a critique of Romantic beliefs

about achieving a transcendental union with nature. The tragic-comic images of primitive

figures struggling to mimic the contours of the natural world, and the repeated device of

showing figures rooted in the landscapes surrounding them, resonate with Lewis’s

contempt for human efforts that clumsily impersonate bodily harmony with the workings

of nature.21 In the Vorticist journal Blast he castigated the Futurists for being essentially

sentimental Romantics, ridiculed Byron as he 'owed three-forths of his success to his life

and personality', and explained that Rembrandt's reputation is confused on account of his

perceived ‘touching’ sentimentality and 'soul-painting’.22 Lewis was also contemptuous

about painting's ability to communicate an authentic self through individualised mark-

making. Any hope for modern man existed not in such physical actions, but rather in

intellectual invention: ‘at any period an artist should have been able to remain in his

studio, imagining form, and provided he could transmit the logic of his inventions to

another man, could have, without putting brush to canvas, been the best artist of his

day’.23 Pound struggled to explain Lewis's attitude to John Quinn in 1916:

10
Quoted in Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (Jonathan Cape: London,

2000), pp. 109-110.

11
Quoted in O’Keefe, Genius, p. 109.

6
 he is very contemptuous of people who will look at nothing but a certain sort of technical ???

excellence ??? or finish … It is part of his general surge toward the restitution of the proper

valuation of conception, i.e. CONCEPTION then finish. Whereas the journalistic attitude at

present is concerned solely with brushstrokes and colour, NEVER with conception. 24

David Peters Corbett has identified in Workshop of 1915 (Fig. 2) an explicit pictorial

gesture renouncing Romantic surface aesthetics:

12
Daily Mail October 21 1912, Lewisiana Box 167, Cornell University Archives.
13
Quoted in O’Keefe, Genius, p. 123.
14
Quoted in O’Keefe, Genius, p. 110.

15
I refer particularly to how immediacy of contact, frank materiality, and rapidity of execution developed

as signifiers of originality and subjective expression in the later nineteenth century, and to how the fetish

for idiosyncratic facture came to connote the primordial embodiment of the artist in the work, in

contradistinction to the French Academic ideology of the ‘licked surface’. Although the situation in

England was more complex than in France because the dominant pictorial traditions were more painterly,

and distinctions between the academy and progressive art movements more ambiguous, the painted surface

was still increasingly highlighted as a site of indexical truths, and for the display of individual

temperament. See Jonathan Shirland, ‘The Construction of Artistic Masculinity in James McNeill Whistler,

Walter Sickert and Wyndham Lewis c.1880-1914’, unpublished PhD Diss. (University of London, 2002)

pp. 166-174.
16
Michel and Fox (eds.), Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956 (Funk and Wagnalls: New

York, 1969) p. 110.

17
Hugh Kenner, ‘The Visual World of Wyndham Lewis ‘, Walter Michel (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: Paintings

and Drawings (Thames and Hudson: London, 1971) p. 28, 51.

18
Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1 [1914] (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Barbara, 1981) p. 142.

7
 in the lower-right-hand area … a band of maroon paint undergoes across its breadth a

transformation from geometrical element to painterly brushwork. This movement in the picture is

perhaps reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein's satires on the macho facture of American Abstract

Expressionism: carefully drawn or silkscreened imitations of curling brushstrokes, heavy with the

artist's autographic weight, sitting forlornly amidst empty spaces of blank paper. Lewis's frayed

maroon edge here serves a similar function, poking fun at the overtly painterly surfaces of his

modernist competitors.25

In this gesture mocking the romanticisation of the brushstroke Lewis trades upon the

ways in which such painterly strokes had become polluted through a kind of self-

conscious performativity by 1914.26 He concluded that, ‘life and personality fade out of

work like fugitive colours in painting’.27

Yet, when one examines Lewis's surfaces closely, they are not quite as one would

expect. Looking at Workshop again, the stifling geometric forms that confine the patch of

blue sky are counteracted to some degree by vigorous application of paint, especially the

black passages that bracket off the coloured areas. The work seems hastily executed,

spots of blank canvas remain, and there is a distinct patch of red in the far right area and

another smaller smudge towards the bottom left in the small white rectangle. These

features offer some sense of indexicality, and of unintended contact between hand and

canvas. Another striking aspect of Workshop's surface is the collection of pencil marks

throughout the composition that temper the harsh environment with imprecise markings

that re-invest a human presence into the work, rather than imposing further dispassionate

rationality via allusions to an underlying grid system. They interrupt the industrial

19
Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 version (ed.) P. O'Keeffe (Black Sparrow Press: Santa Barbara, 1990)

p. 279.

8
geometries of the city scene, and hark back to the workshop's association with the atelier,

home of the pre-industrial artist. The ironic brushstroke is not the only trace of artistic

labour.

Such investments are not confined to Workshop: in almost all of Lewis's pre-war

works there are markings on the surface that drag the designs back towards intimating the

imperfect labour of the human artist.28 In Vorticist Composition of 1915, pencil lines of

20
Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (Yale University Press: New Haven and London,

2000) chapter 1, pp. 9-34.

21
Lisa Tickner has also argued that in Lewis’s use of the motif of the dance is a subversion of the belief in

the dance as the ideal image of a Romantic transcendence of alienation. By inserting a Dionysian sexual

violence, the activity is transformed from one achieving primordial unity through an abandonment of the

self in the passion of movement, to being merely the staging of a violent temporary release of sexual energy

where any sensation of transcendence is a momentary delusion. See Lisa Tickner, ‘Wyndham Lewis:

Dance and the Popular Culture of Kermesse, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early

Twentieth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2000) pp. 79-116.
22
Lewis, Blast 1, p. 143, 146.
23
Lewis, Blast 1, p. 135.
24
Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 130.
25
Corbett, World in Paint, p. 234.
26
As Richard Schiff has demonstrated, ‘even the personal imprint, the “style” of a painting, began to evoke

an assumed appearance, a false mask, rather than an immediate performance. Throughout the nineteenth

century, but especially around 1900, artists and critics spoke of the creation of false, affected styles of

immediacy, naïveté and originality. One simply imitated the crude personalised marks that had attained

general acceptance as indexical truths’. Richard Schiff, ‘Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of

Abstract Expressionism’, Michael Auping (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments

(Thames & Hudson: London 1987) p. 105.

27
Lewis, Blast 2, p. 42.

9
the initial sketch remain frankly declared, the image stops three quarters of the way down

the paper and lines from the design transgress the bottom horizontal into the otherwise

unmarked area below, making it seem more emphatically hand-made. Lewis's signature is

made on a separate scrap of paper that has been stuck onto the original sheet which, since

Lewis's typical 'W.L' is already included in the corner of the composition, acts as a

foreign body, intruding into the otherwise mechanical image. Composition of 1913 (Fig.

3) is made upon a piece of paper with ragged edges on the top and right hand sides,

indicating that it was ripped from a book. The point where the image has been terminated

seems arbitrary because the design goes beyond where the paper has been torn. These

ragged contours function in a different manner to the frayed maroon band in Workshop

by referencing the sketch-book the design was originally part of.29 Rather than mocking

painterly bravura, the edges point to a site of intimate human creativity, supporting the

indexical charge of the grimy charcoal coloured passages amidst the severely abstracted

areas of unmodulated colour.30

Also striking is the delicacy and diversity of media Lewis used. He produced a

collection of mobile picture surfaces that incorporate watercolour, pen and ink, crayon

and oils to evoke the symptom of painting and the physical labour necessary for pictorial

creation, yet refuse the more bravura painterly gestures of his contemporaries. As Michel

remarks, ‘in an age which increasingly turned to texture … and to large scale, he carried

out pencil drawings washed with watercolour and heightened with gouache, or thinly

painted oils not more than thirty inches high. To the easy appeal of the colour and matter

of most of his contemporaries works, he opposed a world, delicate and often difficult of

access'.31 These delicate works offer a certain intimacy relative to finished oils, and it was

10
primarily through them that Lewis colonised London exhibition spaces. 32 Thus, there is

something more personal about Lewis’s pictorial performances than reproductions

normally suggest, drawing the viewer back in towards these otherwise alienating works.

An encoding of individuality enters subtly into his surface aesthetics, setting up a tension

between the handmade and the machine-like, the deadpan and the personally expressive.

Lewis’s writings also contain concessions to art’s inherent self-expressiveness. In

his article ‘Feng Shui and Contemporary Form’ in Blast 1, Lewis compared artists to

Chinese Geomancers arguing that, ‘their functions and intellectual equipment should be

very alike’, and that ‘in a painting certain FORMS must be SO; in the same meticulous,

profound manner that your pen or a book must lie on the table at a certain angle, your

clothes at night be arranged in a set personal symmetry, certain birds be avoided, a set of

railings tapped with your hand as you pass, without missing one’.33 This is a long way

from claiming that an authentic inner self is realised in the act of painting, but even if

temperament is limited to a geomantic distribution of forms, an 'egotism' still remains in

28
Similar pencil markings and grimy chalk passages are visible in the work of other Vorticist artists

including Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and Helen Saunders. In some instances the initial grid for

the design is also left clearly visible. But the dissonance between these traces and the geometric Vorticist

planes is rarely as pronounced in their work as it is in Lewis’s pieces.

29
A number of Lewis’s most striking abstract works from this period including New York of 1914 were part

of his 'Designs for a Vorticist Sketch-Book'. The exhibition of drawings and studies may have been an

economic necessity for Lewis, and many artists were exhibiting sketches at this time, but the fact remains

that the worked lumps of matter that constituted the privileged centre of Lewis’s public dissemination were

these fragile works on paper.

30
Edwards links this work to the Timon of Athens series Lewis worked on in 1913. He also identifies a

dancing couple in the middle of the composition, with the ‘grating’ in the bottom centre representing the

woman’s skirt. See Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) (Fundacion Juan March: Madrid, 2010) p. 145.

11
the work.34 Another expression of Vorticist ambivalence is Edward Wadsworth's

examination of Kandinsky’s notion of 'inner necessity' in Blast 1, which suggests that

artistic entry into the spirit world can be achieved if form is determined by an inner desire

for expression.35 Lewis, however, disputed the ease of access to a spiritual realm in art

implied by Kandinsky and hated his suggestion that the intellect be surrendered to

facilitate such a process: ‘Kandinsky, docile to the intuitive fluctuations of his soul, and

anxious to render his hand and mind elastic and receptive … allows the rigid chambers of

his brain to become a mystic house haunted by an automatic and puerile spook, that

leaves a delicate trail like a snail’.36 Lewis would not allow himself to be so haunted, but

he did concede in an interview about his designs for the drawing room of Lady Drogheda

with the Daily Mirror in April 1914 that, ‘the spiritual world is the Polar regions of our

psychic existence, and useful ghosts will meet us on its borders, even if we do not

adventure more’.37 He continues by admitting his fascination with Chinese Geomancers

again, arguing that their way of healing sickness through concentrating on the ‘occult and

unfavourable influence’ natural forms and forces have upon the ‘living being near it’ is

analogous to the methods of modernism: ‘all these forces are the material of modern art.

The Cubist is a kind of Geomancer. The art of the future will reach out into these

regions’.38 The tension in Lewis’s surface aesthetics between the hand-made and the

machine-like needs to be put in the context of such declarations which are part of wider
31
Michel, Paintings and Drawings, p. 147
32
For example, his drawing The Architect was exhibited at the second Camden Town group exhibition in

1911; six drawings from his Timon of Athens series, Creation, and Mother and Child were shown at the

second Post-Impressionist exhibition the following year; and Bathers, Design for conversation in Jack,

Design for Painting, Design for Red Duet and Harsh Design were all on display at the Vorticist exhibition

in June 1915.

12
contemporary debates about self-expression inspired in part by Euro-American exposure

to the arts of Asia, and to Japanese art in particular from the 1860s onwards.39

Elisa Evett rightly emphasizes that critics often projected Anglo-European

concerns onto Asian art but it is partly because, 'the utter novelty of Japanese art left it

open to a general free-for-all in both critical evaluation and promulgation of information',

that issues such as modernist self-expression could be addressed through it.40 Because it

was perceived by many writers that the distinction between artists and artisans did not

apply in Japan, grounds for the display of a unique temperament through art were

immediately restricted. Only a handful of Japanese artists were afforded consistent

authorship of works in the West; for European observers, 'the "artist" that was missing in

… Japan was the nineteenth century Romantic image of the artist - the uniquely gifted,

unusually sensitive, imaginative, and original individual who produced high art that

spoke to the mind, imagination and feelings'.41 The use of conventions, which was seen as

generating mannerisms in spatial illusion, colour, and the depiction of the human figure,

was the most cited reason why Japanese art lacked self-expression. Stock formulas short-

circuited European assumptions about the connection between originality, individual

vision, and artistic style.42 However, Japanese brushwork was celebrated precisely

because of its self-expressive qualities. The economy of means and virtuosity of line led

critics to equate Japanese handling with the aesthetics of the sketch. The use of memory

techniques was seen to allow Japanese artists great freedom of expression, circumventing

preoccupation with the accurate depiction of phenomena. The absence of Western

perspective systems was seen to facilitate self-expression in much the same manner.43

13
 The formal elements of Japanese art were accounted for in terms of a racial

mentality that was tied to, 'a theory of knowledge that places intuitive, engaged

understanding of the world in a different category of knowledge from that which is

rational and objective … the enthusiasm for Japanese art can be accounted for, in large

measure, by a longing for an idyllic state of harmony with nature and the fresh directness

of expression made possible by that condition'.44 Where Europeans intellectualized

33
Lewis, Blast 1, p. 138. Lewis essentially repeated this position in his ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’ of

1915 stating, ‘have your breakfast in the ordinary way, and, as the result of your hunger and

unconsciousness, on getting up you will find an air of inevitability about the way the various objects,

plates, coffee-pot, etc., lie upon the table, that it would be very difficult to get consciously. It would be still

more difficult to convince yourself that the deliberate arrangement was natural’. Lewis, Blast 2, p. 46.
35
Edward Wadsworth, ‘Inner Necessity’, Blast 1, p. 119-125. Wadsworth notes that recognition that ‘form

and colour are as much the vital and integral parts of cosmic organisation as they are [the artist’s] means of

expression’, ‘has always consciously and passionately’ been expressed in the ‘art of the East’ but only

‘perceived dimly in Western art’.

36
Lewis, A Review of Contemporary Art’, Blast 2, p. 48.
37
Quoted in Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 110.
38
Quoted in Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 110.
34
Lewis emphasized non-rational aesthetic compulsion when recalling Vorticism in a letter to Charles

Handley-Read in 1949: ‘the way those things were done – are done, by whoever uses this method of

expression – is that a mental-emotive* impulse is let loose upon a lot of blocks and lines of various

dimensions and encouraged to push them around and to arrange them as it will. It is of course not an

accidental, isolated mood: but it is recurrent groups of emotions and coagulations of thinking, as it were,

that is involved. *By this is meant subjective intellection, like magic or religion’. Quoted in Edwards,

Painter and Writer, p. 110.

39
The impact of Japanese art on the development of Impressionism and Aestheticism in the later nineteenth

century is widely recognized of course, but whether this constituted little more than the copying of props,

14
experience, Japanese artists stood for a child-like innocence that achieved a mindless

identification with the natural world. Critics such as Michel Revon in the 1880s,

'contrasted Western introspection and self-orientation … with Japanese denial of self in a

mindless identification with the world outside the self. The idea that the Japanese simply

lets the universe reflect itself in his soul implies a rapport with the world, a connection

uninterrupted by intellectual interpretation'.45 The use of summary form, the leaving of

large areas of the picture space untouched, and the preference for inverse or open

perspective evoked notions of transcendence, and emerging awareness of the relationship

between Japanese aesthetics and Taoist influenced Zen beliefs furthered this perception.

Such ideas were not well established in England, but an idealization of the primitive

nature of Japanese culture was prevalent, partly because of its entanglements in British

discourses with the vogue for Medievalism. The link between the two was not in the art

per se but rather a romanticized notion of the conditions in which art was produced.

Zatlin has explained how this conception helped British critics circumvent uncomfortable

similarities between Japan and Britain as industrializing Island nations and leave

imperialist prejudice secure.46

motifs and compositional arrangements without fundamentally altering European conventions

(Japonaiserie) or amounted to a more profound assimilation of Asian art’s radically different signifying

systems is still much debated. See, for example, Jacques Dufwa, Winds From the East: A Study in the Art of

Manet, Degas, Monet and Whistler 1856-86 (Stockholm, 1981) pp. 160-180, Elisa Evett, The Critical

Reception of Japanese art in late nineteenth century Europe (Michigan, 1982), Gabriel Weisberg et al.,

Japonisme in Art: An International Symposium (Kodansha International: Japan, 1980), Linda Gertner

Zatlin. Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 1997) and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and nineteenth-

century Japan (Routledge: London and New York, 2003).

15
 Binyon’s work evolved out of this context, but was prompted by his

dissatisfaction with the lack of spirituality in Western Art since the Renaissance. His

regular columns for the Saturday Review between 1906 and 1911, and his books on

William Blake and Sandro Botticelli published in 1906 and 1913 respectively repeatedly

returned to this issue.47 Binyon argues that Asian art offers a solution to European art’s

egotistical obsessions with the achievements of man. On one hand, Binyon advocated

Asian art for the way that, ‘the artist sought to illuminate and to realise his own soul’,

noting, ‘'the brushwork should be as personal to the artist as his handwriting … the

strokes should be … an immediate and direct communication of the artist's mood and

thought'.48 But on the other hand he maintained that Asian art represents, ‘not the proud

and conscious assertion of human personality; but instead … [of] all thoughts that lead us

out from ourselves into the universal life’. 49 As his biographer John Hatcher explains,

‘there is a constant stress on transcending the limits of selfhood … his key argument

[was] that Oriental art takes us out of our narrowly human selves into the wider, non-

human life of nature’.50

40
Evett, Critical Reception, p. 28.
41
Evett, Critical Reception, p. 75.
42
Even Japanese critics conceded that tradition imposed limitations on individuality. For example,

Professor Jiro Hirada reviewing for The Studio in May 1911 the fourth exhibition of Fine Art held at Uyeno

Park, Tokyo exclaimed that, 'when our artists acquire a certain skill in the manipulation of oil colours, all

traces of independence and individuality seem to disappear from their work…the style seems to be

empty…there is little personality in their work'. The Studio, 17 May 1911 pp. 296-302.
43
See Yamanda Chisaburo, ‘Exchange of Influences in the Fine Arts Between Japan and Europe’,

Japonisme in Art, p. 13.

16
 Binyon explained that Asian art did not use illusionistic techniques because its

purpose was not to duplicate outward form but rather to penetrate appearances to achieve

empathy with the dynamic energies that lay behind them. He believed that the great

lesson it had to teach was how to manipulate physical reality in the work of art to effect

spiritual expression, and it was his notion of ‘Rhythm’ that was most important for the

development of Vorticist aesthetics, as Corbett has convincingly demonstrated. 51 Binyon

defined this as, ‘the fusion of the spirit with the essential energies that animate the

movement of living things’.52 Japanese art managed to express this because its

conventions were grounded in a saner vision of man’s place in the world than in Western

art, whereby, ‘the continuity of the Universe is felt in the heart and not merely learnt as

the conclusions of delving science’.53 According to his theory, the forms in a picture need

44
Evett, Critical Reception, p. 58.
45
Quoted in Evett, Critical Reception, p. 46.
46
Zatlin, Japonisme, pp. 19-48.
47
See Corbett, Modernity, pp. 26-31 and David Peters Corbett, ‘Laurence Binyon and the Aesthetic of

Modern Art’, Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 6. No.1, Summer 2005, pp. 101-119.
48
L. Binyon, Painting in the Far East: An Introduction To the History of Pictorial Arts in Asia, Especially

China and Japan fourth edition [1908] (Dover: New York, 1969) p. 54, 140.
49
Binyon, Far East, p. 21.
50
Hatcher, Binyon, p. 132, 182.

17
to be thought of in terms of energies. As Binyon wrote in his Flight of the Dragon of

1911,

every picture is a series of ordered relations, controlled, as the body is controlled in the dance, by

the will to express a single idea … the units of line or mass are in reality energies capable of

acting on each other; and, if we discover a way to put these energies into rhythmical relation, the

design at once becomes animated, our imagination enters into it; our minds also are brought into

rhythmical relation with the design, which has become charged with the capability of movement

and life.54

This is an evocative description of the principles of Vorticist picture making, and

Binyon’s ideas directly influenced the rhetoric Lewis and Pound used in promoting the

movement.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Binyon did not believe that ukiyo-e

represented the apogee of Japanese art, but rather the Zen landscapists of Ashikaga or

Muromachi Japan. He argued that the aim of these works was self-conquest and that each

scene was a ‘state of the soul’, but not in the Western sense of artists projecting their own

mental states onto the landscape. He argued, rather, for the reverse: that through focused

51
See Corbett, Modernity, pp. 26-38. Paul Edwards prefers to connect Lewis to Henri Bergson’s notion of

‘rhythmic vitality’. See Edwards, ‘Strange Synthesis’.

52
Binyon acknowledged that this principle was difficult to translate accurately from the Six Canons of

Chinese art laid down by Hsieh Ho in the sixth century, noting, ‘what is rhythm? No one seems to know

precisely, though we can often recognise what we cannot define’. Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the

Dragon (John Murray: London, 1911) p. 11, 13.

53
See Hatcher, Binyon, p. 178.
54
Binyon, Flight of the Dragon pp. 17-18.

18
meditation the artist can become absorbed by nature, and only then does self-realisation

occur. As a result, the artist should strive for what Binyon calls ‘impassioned self-

forgetfulness’, a state in which his own mind and the landscape are expressions of the

same all-pervading ‘rhythm’, the creative power dwelling in the world. 55 It is only in this

way that the artist can ‘get rid of his devouring egoism, his belittling self-

aggrandisement, realise his true place in the universe, and be braced thereby and

fortified’.56 Such practice, for Binyon, constituted a strengthening rather than a

surrendering of one’s intellect since this conception and contemplation of nature, ‘was no

sentimental indulgence, but an invigorating discipline’.57

Binyon's Painting in the Far East of 1908 made these issues seem particularly

relevant by recontextualising nineteenth century European art within Asian traditions.

Daumier and Korin, Whistler and Hokusai, Blake and the poet-painters of Sung, are

paired together, and he equated Japanese notions of transcendence to the Romantic ideals

of Wordsworth, concluding, ‘to many spirits of nineteenth century Europe the Sung

painting would have seemed, had they known it, the very expression of their own

minds’.58 Pertinently, Binyon compared the Wang Wei period of Chinese art with the

development of Impressionism because both exhibited ‘affected weakness and

incoherence of brushwork where an effort towards sincerity and reaction from the

formulated style of academic drawing shows itself in a calculated roughness and

clumsiness of touch’.59 For all of his perceptive insights, Binyon still relied upon

55
Binyon, Flight of the Dragon, p. 28.
56
Binyon, Flight of the Dragon, p. 30.
57
Binyon, Flight of the Dragon, p. 30.

19
European modes of thought to make sense of oriental art, and always maintained that

affinities existed between Asian art and the preoccupations of English Romanticism.

Corbett has shown how Binyon's refusal to reject western artistic heritage divided

the Modernists from their Late-Romantic mentor.60 As Pound stated in Blast 2, ‘his mind

constantly harks back to some folly of nineteenth century Europe, constantly trying to

justify Chinese intelligence by dragging it a little nearer to some Western precedent’. 61

Nevertheless, ‘Mr. Binyon has, indubitably, his moments’, and Pound then proffers nine

quotations from Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon without qualifying analysis. Pound

reviewed the book in 1915, highlighting its central thesis that, ‘it is not essential that the

subject matter should represent or be like anything in ‘nature’; only that it must be active

with a rhythmic vitality of its own’.62 As Zhaoming Qian argues, Pound increasingly

isolated Asian art as a primary stimulus for the development of Vorticist painting’s taut

linear energy and sense of abstract design, going so far as to assert that, ‘if any man is to

bring into Western art the power of Chinese painting it will be Lewis’. 63 Lewis in his
58
Binyon, Far East, p. 150.
59
Binyon, Far East, p. 225.
60
Corbett, Modernity, pp. 26-38.
61
Ezra Pound, 'Chronicles', Blast 2, p. 86.
62
Quoted in Qian, Modernist Response, p. 19.
63
Pound also believed that the design of Edward Wadsworth’s woodcuts such as the now-lost Khaki

registered the influence of Asian aesthetics writing that, it does not look like anything, save perhaps a

Chinese or Japanese painting with the representative patches removed. The feeling I get from this picture is

very much the feeling I get from certain Eastern paintings and I think the feeling that went into it is

probably very much the same as that which moved certain Chinese painters’. He also traced Henri Gaudier-

Breszka’s interest in Chinese calligraphy and the ritual bronzes of the Shang and Zan societies. See Qian,

pp. 19-21.

20
'Review of Contemporary Art' in Blast 2, gets close to advocating the dissolution of

selfhood through finding a perfect union with nature advocated by Binyon when he

writes that, ‘the first reason for not imitating nature is that you cannot convey the emotion

you receive at the contact of Nature by imitating her, but only by becoming her’. 64 He

continues that only through ‘unconscious accident’, but crucially without ‘the certain

futility that accident implies’, will the organization of objects by the artist achieve a

‘rightness’, which is close to Binyon's advocation of ‘impassioned self-forgetfulness’. It

is only through ‘accidental rightness’ that the rhythm of an object or figure can be

depicted, and artists can only achieve this, Lewis writes, by, ‘DOING WHAT NATURE

DOES’.65 He elaborates that, ‘you must be able to organise the cups, saucers and people,

or their abstract plastic equivalent, as naturally as Nature, only with the personal logic of

Art, that gives the grouping significance’, and then castigates Matisse, Picasso and ‘Fry’s

belated little Morris movement’ for substituting, ‘banal and obvious human logic for the

co-ordination and architectures that the infinite forces of Nature bring about’ and for ‘not

living their work’.66 It is not co-incidental that Lewis a few points later chooses ‘the least

and most vulgar Japanese print’ as a ‘masterpiece’ compared to most contemporary art

such as, ‘a Brangwyn, a Nicholson or a Poynter’.67

The principle of 'doing what nature does' is staged on the surface of Lewis’s

works in the way that hand-made markings are dominated by the impersonal architectural

striations of dissonant color. Lewis, after all, proclaimed that nature, ‘with its glosses,

64
Lewis, Blast 2, p. 45.
65
Lewis, Blast 2. p. 46.
66
Lewis, Blast 2, p. 46.
67
Lewis, Blast 2, p. 46.

21
tinting and logical structures, is as efficient as any machine and more wonderful’. 68

Lewis’s use of the term ‘nature’ is complex and often dialectical, but under the conditions

of modernity, especially in London as Lewis repeatedly celebrates, the natural world is

mechanized, fused with the machine and the industrial environment, and it is this ‘nature’

that Lewis strives to emulate in his art.69 The retention of the initial pencil sketchings

serve a crucial purpose: they are not unavoidable mistakes but rather signify the ‘banal

and obvious human logic’ of his contemporaries. In their work, emphatically human

investments are the determining co-ordinates of the surface. In Lewis, by contrast, they

are relegated to the margins, scruffy reminders of banal human 'logic' before the forces of

nature take over. Self-expression is signified by the pencil markings and other traces of

the artists’ presence in Lewis's surfaces, whilst the precise, impersonal architecture that

overpowers them signal attempted self-transcendence through organizing forms

according to their essential animating rhythm. In a manner analogous to the bruising

containment of the human figure by the angular lines of the surrounding environment in

The Vorticist, the interlocking shapes in pieces like Workshop dominate and overwhelm

the ‘odious decoration’ initiated by the initial sketch. Lewis's attempt to geomantically

organize his compositions according to this principle of ‘rhythm’ is the underlying cause

of critics' puzzled discernment of a logic to his designs. To repeat critic of The Times in

front of Kermesse, 'the artist means something by it…there is rhythm that leads us to

believe that the sense is obscure, [but] not wanting'. Lewis substitutes Binyon’s

suggestion of meditation as central to the creative process in Asian art for a kind of

schooled intellectual intensity to achieve the state of mind necessary to harness the

energies behind appearances.

22
 In this way, despite the Vorticists declarations of a violent rupture with the past,

traces of Binyon’s late-Romanticism remain part of Lewis’s Modernist project up to

1915, and Japanese and Chinese art served as the splice since they provided a revitalized

model of the artist’s ability to enact a meaningful union with the workings of the natural

world. Unlike the clichéd Romantic notions of achieving bodily harmony with nature and

the egotistical painterly gestures that Lewis ridiculed in his pre-war works, Binyon

provided a theory of art’s capacity to achieve transcendental experience that he could

believe in, if only briefly. After World War One, he used his art to examine anew the

limitations of the human condition rather than as a vehicle to potentially overcome

them.70 But his Vorticist works do contain this impulse, which sought spiritual expression

through the geomantic distribution of forms across the picture surface. In 1919 Lewis

declared that,

I never associated myself to the jejune folly that would tell you one week that a Polynesian totem

was the only formula by which the mind of man … might be expressed: the next, that only by

some compromise between Ingres and a Chinaman the golden rule of self-expression might be
68
Lewis, Blast 2, p. 46.
69
For an analysis of Lewis’s dualism with regard to the mechanisation of nature and the ‘self’ see Paul

Edwards, ‘“Creation Myth”: The Art and Writing of Wyndham Lewis’, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

(Fundacion Juan March: Madrid, 2010) pp. 21-33.

70
Nonetheless, the influence of Japanese and Chinese art on the development of his post-war drawing style

remains clear in works such as Seated Figure (Bella Medlar) of 1921, and Richard Humphreys argues that

even in the 1930s, ‘his actual touch as a painter is extraordinarily delicate, as if a rococo artist has joined

forces with a Chinese one of the Sung Dynasty’. Richard Humphreys, ‘“A Strange Synthesis: Lewis,

British Art and a World Tradition”’, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) (Fundacion Juan March: Madrid, 2010)

p. 43.

23
 found … The multitudinous formulae that present themselves to the artist … are investigated,

combined, new formulae evolved … The artist "takes what he will”.71

Although only part of his 'multitudinous formulae', by 'taking what he will' from Binyon's

interpretation of Asian art, his surfaces do evolve a 'golden rule of self-expression'

through a compromise between a 'Chinaman', and the authority of line of which Ingres

was symbolic. Vorticism’s ‘first projection of a world-art’ remoulded the yearnings of

late Romanticism within the fires of Modernist form, made rhythmically relational

through the teachings of Binyon.

Notes

71
Wyndham Lewis, foreword to Guns by Wyndham Lewis, exh. Cat. (London: Goupil Gallery, 1919)

24