SOURCE: “Wyndham Lewis: L'Entre Deux Guerres,” in Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 91-39.

In the following excerpt, Sherry examines Lewis's visual art as well as his body of written work to support his claim that Lewis failed to present a philosophically cohesive, unified body of work.

To purge “the bad effects of English education,” Wyndham Lewis set out in 1902, at the age of nineteen, to finish his schooling on continental ground. For six years he followed his instincts along the Franco-German axis we traced in the first chapter. In Munich (1902), he briefly entered a sphere already shaping the debates between the proponents of empathy and abstraction, Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer most prominently.¹ He would return to the city for six months in 1906, two years before the publication of Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Yet the richest intellectual environment would prove to...