Introduction

Abstract

This introduction situates Lewis’s art criticism within historical, biographical, and critical contexts. In most accounts of the history of art criticism in mid-century England, Lewis barely figures. Prevailing narratives favour the work of Roger Fry, Herbert Read, and Kenneth Clarke. Yet, in retrospect, from the vantage point of twenty-first century modernist studies, Lewis’s interrogatory style, his attention to pragmatic and economic conditions surrounding the reception of the work of art, and his occasional critical assaults upon the emerging ‘modernist’ canon, justify a far more central position for Lewis in our understanding of the history of art criticism. This short introduction places Lewis’s work in relation to twenty-first century modernist studies, with its focus on the contexts, networks, and patronage structures which underpinned and generated the work canonised as modernist – a canonising project in which Lewis participated but which he also analysed and scrutinised, positioning himself, in the process, as one of the chief internal critics of the fields of visual and literary modernism.