Mortal Blow

The editor of the London Criterion and the most gift-stricken poet of his time is a tall man with a large, pale face, gentle, cavernous dark eyes, a Roman beak, cub ears and a meditative mouth. He has a famous aversion to being photographed and never until this spring had he sat for an important portrait in oils. Last week the completed Portrait of T. S. Eliot by Artist-Author Wyndham Lewis suddenly became celebrated. It was refused a place in the Royal Academy's annual exhibition of British Art. And in protest against this act the Academy's most distinguished member, bearded, boggling Artist Augustus John, promptly and gratefully resigned. Said he: "A picture by a person of Lewis' eminence should have been unquestionably exhibited. ... I shall be far more at home outside of the R.A."

Poet Eliot frequently had to sit most of the night while Artist Lewis worked feverishly on his portrait, which shows him looking dark and bitter in a grey-blue suit. When the picture was rejected he wrote to Lewis: "The portrait is one by which I am quite willing posterity should know me. . . . But I am glad to think that a portrait of myself is not to appear in the exhibition of the Royal Academy." Last week black-hatted, black-witted Wyndham Lewis (The Apes of God) turned up as a critic at the Academy's socialite preview and enjoyed himself among the stiff Coronation portraits. Artist John's resignation, said he, had dealt the Academy a mortal blow, "if it is possible to use the expression 'mortal blow' with reference to a corpse."

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