Wyndham Lewiss Tarr is a satirical novel about English painter Frederick Tarr (based on Lewis) and German artist Otto Kreisler in early 20th-century Paris. Their rivalry and relationships with two women, Bertha Lunken and Anastasia Vasek, dramatize the hypocrisies of bourgeois-bohemian artistic society. Tarr expresses Lewiss ideals of separating art and life, while Kreisler represents a debased German Romanticism. Published in 1918 and revised in 1928, Tarr is a key work of English-language modernist fiction, Lewiss disputes with other major modernist writers notwithstanding. The character of Kreisler also enacts Lewiss criticisms of the work and influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, while also drawing from the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
