‘I have given myself up to the study of the State’: Wyndham Lewis, Modernism, the Avant-garde, and the State

In his introduction to the recent Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis, Tyrus Miller describes the modernist painter, novelist, and critic Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) as an embodiment of ‘the boundary crossing nature of the avant - garde’ (2016, p. 6). In Miller’s account, the avant - garde of the early twentieth century ‘tore apar t the conventional boundaries between the various arts, between artistic and political activity, and between aesthetic works and conceptual discourse’ (2016 p. 6). The historical avant - garde — by which is meant the various groupings of artists of experimenta l artists and writers which emerged across Europe in the years prior to the First World War — can be broadly characterised by its vehement opposition to bourgeois society, and its conception of the potential of experimental art and literature to act as a cat alyst for radical social change