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ArtOctober 2008 Exhibition note On "Wyndham Lewis Portraits" at the National Portrait Gallery, London. "Wyndham Lewis Portraits" Wyndham Lewis is best known as a modernist and as the leader of the Vorticists, but the Vorticists’ swirling style of vigorous erratic curves is not best suited to the art of portraiture. There remains a prevailing prejudice that we should be able to recognize a particular individual in his or her portrait rather than see them sliding away into featurelessness through the force of the painter’s gravity. Accordingly Lewis devised a technique which he called “Burying Euclid deep in the living flesh.” It is doubtful whether Euclid, who revered above all the simplicity and regularity of the circle and the straight line, would have been impressed by this evocation of his name in connection with the irregular intersecting curves of this leading Vorticist. Lewis’s embedding of geometrical shapes i ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 October 2008, on page 43 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Exhibition-note-3917
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 The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Karen Wilkin On "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. On "Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958" at the McMullen Museum, Boston College. On "Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes" at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London. On "Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now" at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
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