Out of Air: Theorizing the Art Object in Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis

According to Gertrude Stein, the phenomenological space of the beholder is distinct from the space of the art object. Instead of producing an art that merges content and context—a painting and its beholder's place, a poem and its reader's point of view—Stein makes everything about the beholder or reader irrelevant to her art. She accomplishes this aim in Tender Buttons (1914) by removing punctuation. Although in discussing Wyndham Lewis's novelistic dramatization of two characters intruding into a painting (The Childermass [1928]) I describe exactly the opposite of Stein's theory of art, and although Lewis himself saw his position as completely opposed to Stein, Lewis also advocated an art that imagined the beholder as irrelevant.