It may seem like the modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and Kanye West (the rapper and onetime presidential hopeful now known as Ye) have little in common. But their stories are connected: both are known for making controversial statements about the Nazis.
In 1931, Lewis published a sympathetic study of Adolf Hitler, who was then still on his way to power in Germany. Simply titled Hitler, his book was politically naive and casually antisemitic. Almost a century later, in late 2022, Ye made a sequence of antisemitic remarks, aligned himself with Hitler, praised Nazism and denied the Holocaust.
Both artists faced boycotts and public vilification. In the years after his Hitler book Lewis found himself, as he put it in his poem One-Way Song (1933), “not famous but infamous”. He started to suspect that readers were avoiding his books and that he had gained a reputation for disastrous thinking.
