Percy Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of T.S. Eliot

Talk

Work in focus: 'Portrait of T.S. Eliot' by Wyndham Lewis

Friday 13 July 2018 11am - 12pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts

£10, £6 concessions.

The Great Spectacle

Join Dr Nathan Waddell as he reveals the story of the controversial artist, writer and critic Wyndham Lewis, his relationship to T. S. Eliot and why the portrait was rejected by the Summer Exhibition in 1938.

Wyndham Lewis’s 1938 portrait of his friend and fellow modernist T. S. Eliot is one of his key paintings of the inter-war period. Eliot rated it highly, yet it was rejected by the Royal Academy, an institution of which Lewis had always been critical. Part publicity stunt, part sincere tribute, the portrait tells us as much about Eliot’s significance as about Lewis’s impishness. In his talk, Nathan Waddell will explore these elements of the work in view of Lewis’s relationship with Eliot, his other portraits of the period, and his critique of the very modernisms he did so much to energise and embolden.

£10, £6 concessions.

The Great Spectacle

Go to the exhibition

Nathan Waddell

Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is current Chairperson of the Wyndham Lewis Society and is in the early stages of writing a book on Lewis’s politics and the dystopian imaginary.

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