The loan exhibition at the spring Olympia Fine Art & Antiques fair has become a highlight of the London exhibitions calendar

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Michael Hall

The loan exhibition at the spring Olympia Fine Art & Antiques fair has become a highlight of the London exhibitions calendar. APOLLO takes great pleasure in publishing the catalogues of these exhibitions as they represent everything the magazine stands for: good scholarship, new discoveries and serious excitement about the visual arts.

Every year Angus Stewart and his colleagues coax from dozens of private and institutional collectors an ambitious and revealing selection of works, with results that can dramatically change public perception of an artist; think, for example, of the revelatory Keith Vaughan show of three years ago. This year's exhibition looks equally likely to transform our ideas about Wyndham Lewis, with the public display--often the first public display--of so many virtually unknown works. They certainly justify Lewis's own description of his work--he was never slow to praise himself--as 'electric with a mastered and vivid vitality'.

His reputation is not as high as it deserves, and not only because his reputation understandably plummeted thanks to his admiration for Hitler. Because he is so closely associated with Vorticism and the avant-garde of the time of the First World War, many people do not realise that he went on working until the 1950s. Moreover, like David Jones, for example, he is equally distinguished as a writer and artist, and that paradoxically tends to mean that his achievement in both fields is underrated. This exhibition offer a rare opportunity to assess Lewis's achievement in the visual arts as a whole, in a way that is likely to influence opinions of him for years to come.