The Surrender of Barcelona 1937

Wyndham Lewis made this painting, The Surrender of Barcelona, with oil on canvas, and the way he layers forms gives it a real sense of depth, even though the color palette is pretty restrained. I love how he doesn't shy away from showing us the process. Looking at this painting, I’m struck by how the texture and color work together. See that big cylindrical tower in the center? It’s almost like Lewis built it up with these layers of ochre and brown. And the way the paint is applied, it's neither thick nor thin, but somewhere in between, suggesting a kind of tension, a building up and breaking down at the same time. It makes you think about the weight of history. Lewis, who founded the Vorticism movement, has a lot in common with the Italian Futurists, and you can see that in this piece. Like them, he understood art as an ongoing dialogue. The beauty of a painting like this is that it embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations rather than any single, fixed meaning.