Scottish (Portrait of a Woman, Facing Forward)

Equal parts artist, writer, and aesthetic theorist, Wyndham Lewis is perhaps best known as the founder of the avant-garde Vorticist movement. Yet, in a brief essay reviewing his career for the catalog of his 1956 retrospective exhibition, Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, the artist would write that his work as a portraitist was his "grand visual legacy." For Lewis, the experience of a portrait could be derived from "abstract proportions and shape, merely, of a pictorial composition apart from its human reference." Yet, the human reference should not be dismissed, Lewis reminds, as "there is a much closer relationship between the most representative and the most abstract painter, than is generally supposed." The artist spoke of his desire to bury "Euclid deep in human flesh," and the arcs, ogees, and ellipses that divide and rule the human visage in Scottish brilliantly illustrate this aim, producing a portrait that simultaneously suggests individual character and archetypal form.