The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (273 page)

(1805–76).
English painter, mainly in watercolour, son of the engraver and landscape painter
Frederick Christian Lewis
(1779–1856). He was a great traveller and spent the years 1841–51 in Cairo. His colourful and highly detailed scenes of life in the harem and bazaar were a huge success in London, and after his return there in 1851 he concentrated on them exclusively, playing a major part in creating the vogue for ‘Oriental’ subjects. His brother,
Frederick Christian Lewis , Jr.
(1813–75), was also a painter. He worked in India for many years and is sometimes known as ‘Indian Lewis’ to distinguish him from his brother.

 
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(1882–1957).
British painter, novelist, and critic, born of a British mother and a wealthy American father on his yacht off Nova Scotia. He came to England as a child, studied at the
Slade
School, 1898–1901, then lived on the Continent for seven years, mostly in Paris. In 1909 he returned to England and in the years leading up to the First World War emerged as one of the leading figures in British avant-garde art. From 1911 he developed an angular, machine-like, semiabstract style that had affinities with both
Cubism
and
Futurism
. He worked for a short time with Roger
Fry
at the
Omega Workshops
, but after quarrelling with him in 1914 he formed the Rebel Art Centre, from which grew
Vorticism
, a movement of which he was the chief figure and whose journal
Blast
he edited. He served with the Royal Artillery, 1915–17, and as an
Official War Artist
, 1917–18, carrying his Vorticist style into works such as
A Battery Shelled
(Imperial War Museum, London). In 1919 he founded Group X as an attempt to revive Vorticism, but this failed, and from the late 1920s he devoted himself mainly to writing, in which he often made savage attacks on his contemporaries (particularly the
Bloomsbury Group
). His association with the British Fascist Party and his praise of Hitler alienated him from the literary world. The best-known paintings of his later years are his incisive portraits; the rejection of that of T. S. Eliot (Durban Art Gallery) caused Augustus
John
to resign in disgust from the
Royal Academy
in 1938.
Lewis was the most original and idiosyncratic of the major British artists working in the first decades of the 20th cent., and he was among the first artists in Europe to produce completely abstract paintings and drawings. He built his personal style on features taken from Cubism and Futurism but did not accept either. He accused Cubism of failure to ‘synthesize the quality of LIFE with the significance or spiritual weight that is the mark of all the greatest art’ and of being mere visual acrobatics. The Futurists, he wrote, had the vivacity that the Cubists lacked, but they themselves lacked the grandness and the ‘great plastic qualities’ that Cubism achieved. His own work, he declared, was ‘electric with a mastered and vivid vitality’. He wrote several books, including novels, notably
Tarr
(1918), and collections of essays and criticism.
Blasting and Bombadiering
(1937),
Wyndham Lewis the Artist
(1939), and
Rude Assignment
(1950) are autobiographical.

 
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(1928– ).
American sculptor, graphic artist, writer, and
Conceptual artist
. His career did not take off until the early 1960s, when he turned to sculpture and became one of the leading exponents of
Minimal art
. His ‘structures’, as he prefers to call them, characteristically involve permutations of simple basic elements, sometimes arranged in box or table-like constructions. He is also an exponent of Conceptual art; in 1968, for example, he fabricated a metal cube and buried it in the ground at Visser House at Bergeyk in the Netherlands, documenting photographically the object's disappearance (this has also been considered an example of
Land art
). Lewitt has also written numerous articles on Conceptual art. His other work includes prints in various techniques.

 
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(1609–60).
Dutch painter of
genre
scenes, portraits, and still life, probably a pupil of Frans
Hals
in Haarlem, where she spent most of her career (she also worked in Amsterdam). In 1636 she married Jan Miense
Molenaer
, with whom she shared a studio, using the same models and props. Leyster was one of Hals's best followers and her work has sometimes passed as his, an example being the
Lute Player
in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Her monogram includes a star, a play on ‘Ley/ster’ (lode star).

 
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(1885–1962).
French painter, sculptor, and writer on art. He worked initially as a commercial woodcarver and was largely self-taught as a painter. His early work was
Fauvist
in spirit, but from 1911 he adopted the stylistic mannerisms of
Cubism
to his very varied range of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, interiors, mythological scenes, and portraits. Lhote, however, was more important as a teacher and critic of modern art than as a practising artist. He exercised an extensive influence on younger artists both French and foreign through his own academy of art, the Académie Montparnasse, which he opened in 1922, and he founded a South American branch on a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1952. His writings included treatises on landscape painting (1939) and figure painting (1950).

 
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