Strange Faces

Abstract This essay analyzes a variety of portraits by modernist Wyndham Lewis painted between 1911 and 1949, synthesizing their style and execution with the prodigious amount of art criticism he generated during the same period. Elaborating on Lewis’ ideas of “world-art” and temporal “synthesis,” and extending from recent works in global modernism by Stephen Ross, Alys Moody and Peter Killaney, the article argues that Lewis (in line with other modernist art critics, such as William Empson) drew on the global as a frame of reference for a modernist critical hermeneutic that was articulated as a mode of vision. Consistent with recent descriptions of global modernism, Lewis emphasized vision as capable of re-orienting the relationship between the globalized center and the periphery, institution and outsider. In particular, Lewis’ critical and painterly output drew on a globalized framework to reformulate the traditional, western idea of the portrait and, more particularly, its accompanying ideal of a face.