Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an English artist and writer best known as the founder of the Vorticist movement. Having travelled to Paris to study painting in the early years of the twentieth century, he returned to London in 1908 where he was amongst the first British artists to champion the virtues of Expressionism and Cubism. Soon, he would be creating paintings that borrowed the geometric forms of Cubism which he applied to images of machines and architecture. The name Vorticism, meanwhile, was derived from the idea that the tumultuous modern world should be viewed through the prism of a spiralling vortex. Lewis published two editions of Blast, a Vorticist journal that attacked the values of Victorian England and featured Imagist (anti-romantic) poetry and radical graphic design. He then served in the First World War as an artillery officer before being commissioned as a war artist (though his finished paintings were not to everyone’s tastes). Lewis continued to paint after the war, moving into portraiture. He also devoted more time to writing and published a collection of books, short stories and essays. Lewis was a socialite and one of the true personalities of early-to-mid twentieth century British art. But his cavalier attitude towards modern life and human relationships, not to mention his early support for the Nazi party, mean that it has often proved difficult for critics to separate Lewis “the personality” from his art.