01 Painting, The art of War, Wyndham Lewis' The Surrender of Barcelona, with footnotes

Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957

The Surrender of Barcelona, c. 1934–7

Oil paint on canvas

838 × 597 mm

Tate

Lewis was working on this painting in the year of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The conflict in Spain was the setting for Lewis's novel 'The Revenge for Love', which was published in 1937. However, Lewis denied any connection between this picture and the book. In 1950 Lewis wrote: 'In the Surrender of Barcelona I set out to paint a Fourteenth Century scene as I should do it could I be transported there, without too great change in the time adjustment involved.' The frieze of soldiers in the foreground can be seen as alluding to Velasquez's painting 'Surrender of Breda' 1635. More on this painting

Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was an English artist and writer best known as the founder of the Vorticist movement. Having travelled to Paris to study painting in the early years of the twentieth century, he returned to London in 1908 where he was amongst the first British artists to champion the virtues of Expressionism and Cubism. Soon, he would be creating paintings that borrowed the geometric forms of Cubism which he applied to images of machines and architecture. The name Vorticism, meanwhile, was derived from the idea that the tumultuous modern world should be viewed through the prism of a spiralling vortex. Lewis published two editions of Blast, a Vorticist journal that attacked the values of Victorian England and featured Imagist (anti-romantic) poetry and radical graphic design. He then served in the First World War as an artillery officer before being commissioned as a war artist (though his finished paintings were not to everyone's tastes). Lewis continued to paint after the war, moving into portraiture. He also devoted more time to writing and published a collection of books, short stories and essays. Lewis was a socialite and one of the true personalities of early-to-mid twentieth century British art. But his cavalier attitude towards modern life and human relationships, not to mention his early support for the Nazi party, mean that it has often proved difficult for critics to separate Lewis "the personality" from his art.. More on Percy Wyndham Lewis

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