Wyndham Lewis

The Crowd

?exhibited 1915

© Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G A Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity)

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In Tate Britain

Spotlights: Vorticism

Free

Artist: Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957
Medium: Oil paint and graphite on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 2007 × 1537 mm
frame: 2195 × 1740 × 60 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1964
Reference: T00689

Display caption

The outbreak of war in 1914 led Lewis to think about the power of political ideas to form and manipulate crowds. ‘THE CROWD is the first mobilisation of a country’, he wrote in the July 1915 issue of Blast. Here tiny, interlinked figures inhabit a vast abstracted city. Some seem to be leaving the ‘Enclo[sure]’, perhaps climbing towards the hive-like structure of industrial treadmills at the top right. The larger figures at the bottom are ambiguous. They could represent overseers or be inciting the crowd to revolutionary action.

Gallery label, October 2020

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