Equal parts artist, writer, and aesthetic theorist, Wyndham Lewis is perhaps best known as the founder of the avant-garde Vorticist movement. Yet, in a brief essay reviewing his career for the catalog of his 1956 retrospective exhibition, " Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism", the artist would write that his work as a portraitist was his "grand visual legacy." For Lewis, the experience of a portrait could be derived from "abstract proportions and shape, merely, of a pictorial composition...apart from its human reference." Yet, the human reference should not be dismissed, Lewis reminds, as "there is a much closer relationship ... between the most representative and the most abstract painter, than is generally supposed." The artist spoke of his desire to bury "Euclid deep in human flesh," and the arcs and ellipses echoing one another in fluid counterbalance in "Portrait Head of a Woman" brilliantly illustrate this aim, producing a portrait that at once suggests individual nuance and archetypal form. This portrait depicts the artist's wife, Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900-1979), whom he married in 1930. She appears in numerous drawings by Lewis, either as the identified subject or the unnamed model. The rhythmic undulations and delicate pencil shading evoke the intimate relation between the two, symbolically announced by the presence of her wedding band, a detail also present in the related drawings "Woman with Yellow Hair" (1936) and "The Artist's Wife" (1938). -Rory O'Dea. 2009.
Signed and dated at lower right, in pencil, "Wyndham Lewis 1936".