Ezra Pound (Lewis)

Painting by Wyndham Lewis

Ezra Pound

Artist| Wyndham Lewis
Year| 1939
Medium| Oil on canvas
Dimensions| 76.2 cm × 101.6 cm (30.0 in × 40.0 in)
Location| Tate, London

Ezra Pound is a portrait of the American poet Ezra Pound, made by his friend Wyndham Lewis in 1939.[1]

Lewis began as an avant-garde painter and became friends with Pound in 1909 or 1910. In 1914, they co-founded the art movement Vorticism.[1] Due to a lack of commercial success, Lewis turned to writing, which became his main means of expression from the 1920s. He created some later paintings, most notably portraits in oil of his avant-gardist friends. These included portraits of T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Pound.[1][2] He made sketches of James Joyce but never painted him.[2]

Lewis had made a three-quarter-length portrait of a standing Pound which was exhibited in 1919 but is lost. In the 1920s, Lewis was critical of Pound's writings, but eventually decided to celebrate him with another portrait, which he finished in 1939. A watercolour sketch and a crayon study of the head for the 1939 portrait are both dated 1938.[1]

The portrait of Pound shows the poet leaning back in a chair with closed eyes. Beside him is a table with newspapers. The composition is based on diagonal lines formed by Pound's reclining body, offset by vertical lines in the image's left side.[1]

The painter Walter Sickert saw the painting in 1939 and sent a telegram to Lewis where he declared him the greatest portraitist of all time.[2] Tate in London bought the work the same year.[1]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b c d e f "Ezra Pound". Tate. Retrieved 9 July 2022.
2. ^ a b c Frazzoni, Maria (15 January 2019). "Wyndham Lewis' Portraits". DailyArt Magazine. Retrieved 9 July 2022.

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Wyndham Lewis

Books|

* Tarr (1918)
* The Wild Body (1927)
* The Apes of God (1930)
* Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

Paintings|

* The Crowd (1914–1915)
* A Battery Shelled (1919)
* Edith Sitwell (1923–1935)
* The Surrender of Barcelona (1934–1937)
* Portrait of T. S. Eliot (1938)
* Ezra Pound (1939)

Miscellaneous|

* Blast
* Vorticism
* The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915

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Ezra Pound

Poetry|

* A Lume Spento (July 1908)
* A Quinzaine for this Yule (December 1908)
* "Ballad of the Goodly Fere" (1909)
* Ripostes (1912)
* "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)
* Cathay (1915)
* "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
* Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
* The Cantos (1917–1968)
* Cultural references in The Cantos

Other works|

* The Spirit of Romance (1910)
* Des Imagistes (1914)
* ABC of Reading (1934)
* Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935)
* Guide to Kulchur (1938)
* Radio broadcasts, 1941–1945
* If This Be Treason (1948)

Concepts|

* Ideogrammic method
* Imagism
* Parable of the Sunfish
* Periplum
* Three Kinds of Poetry
* Vorticism

Family|

* William Wadsworth (maternal ancestor)
* Thaddeus C. Pound (grandfather)
* Dorothy Shakespear (wife)
* Omar Pound (son)
* Olivia Shakespear (mother-in-law)
* Olga Rudge (partner)
* Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter)
* Boris de Rachewiltz (son-in-law)

Literary circle|

* Richard Aldington
* E. E. Cummings
* H.D.
* T. S. Eliot
* Ford Madox Ford
* Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
* Ernest Hemingway
* T. E. Hulme
* James Joyce
* James Laughlin
* New Directions
* Wyndham Lewis
* Archibald MacLeish
* Charles Elkin Mathews
* William Brooke Smith
* Allen Tate
* William Carlos Williams
* W. B. Yeats

Works about|

* Discretions
* The Pound Era
* Reading Pound Reading
* "Visits to St. Elizabeths"
* A ZBC of Ezra Pound

Miscellaneous|

* Blast
* Brunnenburg
* CasaPound
* Julien Cornell
* Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound
* Hugh Kenner
* Ezra Pound (Lewis)
* Famous Last Words
* Modernism
* St. Elizabeths Hospital
* Vienna Café

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