Protraction

Although it was created a year before the militant arrival of Vorticism, Protraction is filled with the pugnacity which brought the rebel movement into being when BLAST magazine was published. This interesting painting was exhibited in the important Vorticists exhibition at the Penguin Club, New York, in 1917. The unusual word Wyndham Lewis used as the title of this dark and angry image, executed with a great amount of forcefulness in pencil, crayon and watercolour, conjures up the idea of a muscle being lengthened to make it last longer. But ‘protractor’ also means an instrument for measuring angles, usually in the form of a graduated semi-circle. So Lewis may well have wanted his picture’s title to indicate his involvement with abstraction. And at first, anyone looking at his Protraction might well imagine that it is essentially an abstract image.

Only after careful scrutiny of this fascinating work do we realise that it probably contains at least two angry creatures leaping towards the right side of the picture, against a backdrop of clashing, fragmented forms. The largest creature seems to have an open mouth, as if hungrily waiting for the opportunity to devour an enemy. But its body is also redolent of machine forms, and the other creature is built from elements which suggest a rocket hurtling through space. The restless forms on the far left look like scattered elements in a battlefield, and so Protraction can on one level be seen as an all too accurate prophecy of the First World War’s arrival one year later. This militaristic tone evidently appealed to his patron John Quinn, who purchased Protraction in 1916. Interestingly the work would later be owned by the revered photographer Lee Miller.

On another level, though, Lewis’s picture vividly evokes the power-struggles he initiated and experienced during the course of 1913. Roger Fry had included him in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, a major avant-garde show held in the autumn of 1912. And by the following summer, Lewis was involved with Fry’s Omega Workshops, a Bloomsbury project dedicated to the creation of avant-garde decorative commissions. But Lewis then heard, from his friend Spencer Gore, that Fry had stolen a desirable commission from the Daily Mail to design a ‘Post-Impressionist Room’ at the Ideal Home Exhibition. Gore claimed that the commission was originally intended for himself, Lewis and Fry. When Gore told this very disturbing story to Lewis, he shouted angrily at Fry and marched out of the Omega Workshops headquarters in Fitzroy Square. Then, in an excoriating ‘Round Robin’ distributed to the Press, Lewis denounced Fry as ‘the Pecksniff-shark, a timid but voracious journalistic monster, unscrupulous, smooth-tongued and, owing chiefly to its weakness, mischievous’.

Lewis and his allies, who included Edward Wadsworth, were now committed to exploring the new industrial dynamism. They felt ready to fight like storm-troopers in an iconoclastic battle against Fry and his Bloomsbury associates. By the end of 1913, Lewis anticipated the advent of Vorticism by asserting that ‘the work of this group of artists underlines such geometric bases and structures of life’. They can clearly be seen in Protraction, and so does Lewis’s declaration that all ‘revolutionary painting today has in common the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist’.
Richard Cork

We are very grateful to Paul Edwards for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.