wyndham lewis portraits
Percy Wyndham Lewis's portraits currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery in London, created in the early half of the twentieth century, are truly lovely, and I especially like his rendering of TS Eliot against a background so supposedly "distasteful" the Royal Academy rejected it in 1938. But his right-wing social and political views weren't so hot, and it's hard not to let that influence how I look at his work. Similarly uncomfortable: I found out after I posted the Mario Sironi picture yesterday that Sironi not only was a supporter of Mussolini but also contributed a ton of his drawings to fascist newspapers. Can you ever really separate the art from the artist?