The largest ever survey of the British Modernist artist Wyndham Lewis, which opens this week at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, will include a rare early drawing once owned by the late art critic Brian Sewell.
The pen drawing, titled An Oriental Design (around 1900-05), is the earliest work in the show and was made while Lewis was a student at the Slade School of Art in London. “[The drawing], with its small scale and dense cross-hatching, is Lewis’ attempt to copy Augustus John’s new Rembrandt style,” says the exhibition’s curator Richard Slocombe in a statement. Not a great deal of work survives from the artist’s early career, Slocombe tells The Art Newspaper.
The drawing was sold for £6,250 (with fees) to a private collector at a Christie’s auction in September last year. Sewell, who worked at the auction house for nearly a decade as a young man before turning his hand to art criticism, built up his sizeable collection over several decades. It included works by Andrea Sacchi, Joseph Anton Koch and John Craxton.
The Lewis exhibition—titled Life, Art, War (23 June-1 January 2018)—is the first retrospective in 40 years dedicated to the controversial artist and writer who founded Vorticism, the UK’s only "true avant-garde movement", according to Slocombe.
• For more on the exhibition, see Manchester gets first comprehensive retrospective of Wyndham Lewis in 40 years.