World War I
During World War I she was a nurse in France and then with the American Friends Service Committee. She had a nervous breakdown in 1920 following her war experiences. She received medical advice not to paint, but Lewis suspected that it was her modern style that was causing the doctors concern, and wrote to her that "the best possible distraction for you would be to paint".
She was at the centre of the London avant-garde world, acquainted with both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, with her poems and illustrations being published, including in the Vorticist Blast magazine. In the 1930s she did portraits of poets, including Dylan Thomas and exhibited with Charles Ginner and Barbara Hepworth in the London Group, as well as with Ivon Hitchens and Ben Nicholson in the Seven and Five Society, having joined both these groups in 1926.
Read more about this topic: Jessica Dismorr
Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“O I know they make war because they want peace; they hate so that they may live; and they destroy the present to make the world safe for the future. When have they not done and said they did it for that?”
—Elizabeth Smart (1913–1986)