Wyndham Lewis - The 1940s and After

The 1940s and After

Lewis spent World War II in the United States and Canada. Artistically the period is mainly important for the series of watercolour fantasies around the themes of creation, crucifixion and bathing that he produced in Toronto in 1941–42. He returned to England in 1945. By 1951, he was completely blind. In 1950 he published the autobiographical Rude Assignment, in 1951 a collection of allegorical short stories about his life (and the life of his friends) in "the capital of a dying empire," entitled "Rotting Hill," and in 1952 a book of essays on writers such as George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux, entitled "The Writer and the Absolute." This was followed by the semi-autobiograpical novel "Self Condemned" (1954), a major late statement.