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Vorticism was a London-based
modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist
Wyndham Lewis Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include ''Tarr'' ( ...
. The movement was partially inspired by Cubism and was introduced to the public by means of the publication of the Vorticist manifesto in ''
Blast Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...
'' magazine. Familiar forms of representational art were rejected in favour of a geometric style that tended towards a hard-edged abstraction. Lewis proved unable to harness the talents of his disparate group of avant-garde artists; however, for a brief period Vorticism proved to be an exciting intervention and an artistic riposte to
Marinetti Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye ...
's Futurism and the
post-impressionism Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction a ...
of
Roger Fry Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developme ...
's Omega Workshops. Vorticist paintings emphasised 'modern life' as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas and vorticist sculpture created energy and intensity through 'direct carving'.


Prelude to Vorticism

In the summer of 1913 Roger Fry, with
Duncan Grant Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 – 8 May 1978) was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. His father was Bartle Grant, a "poverty-stricken" major i ...
and
Vanessa Bell Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 30 May 1879 – 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf (née Stephen). Early life and education Vanessa Stephen was the eld ...
, set up the Omega Workshops in
Fitzrovia Fitzrovia () is a district of central London, England, near the West End. The eastern part of area is in the London Borough of Camden, and the western in the City of Westminster. It has its roots in the Manor of Tottenham Court, and was urban ...
– in the heart of bohemian London. Fry was an advocate of an increasingly abstract art and design practice, and the studio/gallery/retail outlet allowed him to employ and support artists in sympathy with this approach, such as Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and
Edward Wadsworth Edward Alexander Wadsworth (29 October 1889 – 21 June 1949) was an English artist, closely associated with modernist Vorticism movement. He painted coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life in tempera medium and works printed usin ...
. Lewis had made an impact at the Allied Artists' Salon the previous year with a huge virtually abstract work, ''Kermesse'' (now lost), and in the same year he had worked with the American sculptor
Jacob Epstein Sir Jacob Epstein (10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) was an American-British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British subject in 1911. He often produce ...
on the decoration of Madame Strindberg's notorious cabaret theatre club The Cave of the Golden Calf. Lewis and his Omega Workshop colleagues Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth exhibited together later in the year at Brighton with Epstein and
David Bomberg David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys. Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henr ...
. Lewis curated the exhibition's 'Cubist Room' and provided a written introduction in which he attempted to cohere the various strands of abstraction on display: 'These painters are not associated here, but form a vertiginous, but not exotic, island in the placid and respectable archipelago of English Art.'


Rebel artists

A quarrel with Roger Fry provided Lewis with a pretext to leave the Omega Workshops and set up a rival organisation. Financed by Lewis's painter friend Kate Lechmere, the
Rebel Art Centre Vorticism was a London-based modernist art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. The movement was partially inspired by Cubism and was introduced to the public by means of the publication of the Vorticist manifesto in '' ...
was established in March 1914 at 38 Great Ormond Street. It was to be a platform for the art and ideas of Lewis's circle, and a lecture series included talks by Lewis's friend the poet Ezra Pound, the novelist Ford Madox Hueffer (later
Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer ( ); 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals '' The English Review'' and ''The Transatlantic Review'' were instrumental in ...
) and the Italian 'Futurist',
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye d ...
. Marinetti had been a familiar – and provocative – presence in London since 1910, and Lewis had seen him create an art movement on the basis of his 'Futurist' manifesto. It seemed as if everything novel or shocking in London was now being described as 'Futurist' – including the work of the English Cubists. When Marinetti and the English Futurist
C. R. W. Nevinson Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (13 August 1889 – 7 October 1946) was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initial ...
published a manifesto of 'Vital English Art', giving the Rebel Art Centre as an address, it seemed like an attempted takeover. A few weeks later, Lewis took out an advertisement in ''The Spectator'' to announce the publication of 'The Manifesto of the Vorticists' – an English abstract art movement that was a 'parallel movement to Cubism and Expressionism' and would, the advertisement promised, be a 'Death Blow to
Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
and Futurism'.


Inventing Vorticism

Ezra Pound had introduced the concept of 'the vortex' in relation to modernist poetry and art early on in 1914. At its most obvious, for example, London could be seen to be a 'vortex' of intellectual and artistic activity. However, for Pound there was a more specific – if obscure – meaning: ' he vortex wasthat point in the cyclone where energy cuts into space and imparts form to it ... the pattern of angles and geometric lines which is formed by our vortex in the existing chaos.' Lewis saw the potential of 'Vorticism' as an exciting rallying call that was also sufficiently vague, he hoped, to embrace the individualism of the rebel artists. Lewis's Vorticist manifesto was to be published in a new literary and art journal, ''
BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...
'' – ironically, the journal's title had been suggested by Nevinson, who was now persona non grata since the 'Vital English Art' manifesto. The French sculptor, painter and anarchist
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (né Gaudier; 4 October 1891 – 5 June 1915) was a French artist and sculptor who developed a rough-hewn, primitive style of direct carving. Biography Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, ...
had met Ezra Pound in July 1913, and their ideas on 'The New Sculpture' developed into a theory of Vorticist sculpture. Two women artists, Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr, who had turned to 'cubist works' in 1913, joined the rebels – and, although they were not regarded highly by the men, Brigid Peppin argues that Saunders's 'juxtapositions of strong and unexpected colour' may have influenced Lewis's later use of forceful colour. Another up-and-coming 'English Cubist' using bold, discordant colour combinations was William Roberts. Writing much later, he recalled Lewis borrowing two paintings – ''Religion'' and ''Dancers'' – to hang at the Rebel Art Centre.


''BLAST''

Although the Rebel Art Centre was short-lived, 'Vorticism' was given assured longevity through the dazzling typography and the audacious (and humorous) 'blasting' and 'blessing' of myriad sacred cows of English and American culture that appeared in the first issue of ''BLAST: The Review of the Great English Vortex'', published in July 1914. ''BLAST'' was launched at a 'riotous celebratory dinner' at the Dieudonné Hotel in the
St James's St James's is a central district in the City of Westminster, London, forming part of the West End. In the 17th century the area developed as a residential location for the British aristocracy, and around the 19th century was the focus of the d ...
area of London on 15 July 1914. The magazine was mainly the work of Lewis, but also included extensive written pieces by Ford Madox Hueffer and
Rebecca West Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...
, as well as poetry by Pound, articles by Gaudier-Brzeska and Wadsworth, and reproductions of paintings by Lewis, Wadsworth, Etchells, Roberts, Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Hamilton. The manifesto was apparently 'signed' by eleven signatories. Lewis, Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska were at the intellectual heart of the project, but Roberts's later comments suggest that most of the group were not made aware of the manifesto's contents before publication. Jacob Epstein was presumably too established to be co-opted as a signatory, and David Bomberg had threatened Lewis with legal action if his work was reproduced in ''BLAST'' and made his independence very clear through a one-man show at the Chenil Galleries, also in July, where his large abstract painting ''Mud Bath'' was prominently displayed outside above the entrance.


Vorticist Exhibition

The publication of ''BLAST'' could not have come at a worse time, as in August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany. There would be little appetite for avant-garde art at this time of national and international crisis; however, a ‘Vorticist Exhibition’ went ahead at the Doré Galleries in New Bond Street the following year. The forty-nine ‘Vorticist’ works by Dismorr, Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis, Roberts, Saunders and Wadsworth showed a commitment to hard-edged, highly coloured, near-abstract work. Perhaps by way of contrast (or comparison), Lewis also invited other artists including Bomberg and Nevinson to participate. A catalogue foreword by Lewis clarified that ‘by Vorticism we mean (a) ACTIVITY as opposed to the tasteful PASSIVITY of Picasso (b) SIGNIFICANCE as opposed to the dull anecdotal character to which the Naturalist is condemned (c) ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT and ACTIVITY (such as the energy of the mind) as opposed to the imitative cinematography, the fuss and hysterics of the Futurists.’ The exhibition was largely ignored by the press, and the reviews that did appear were damning.


''BLAST: War Number''

Just before the exhibition opening, news reached London of Gaudier-Brzeska's death in the trenches in France. A ‘Notice to Public’ in the second number of ''BLAST'' explained that the publication had been delayed ‘due to the War chiefly’ and to ‘the illness of the Editor at the time it should have appeared and before’, and the delay allowed the last-minute inclusion of a tribute to the artist. Compared with ''BLAST'' No. 1 this was a scaled-back production – 102 pages, rather than the 158 pages of the first issue and with simple black-and-white ‘line block’ illustrations. However, compared with ''BLAST'' No. 1, that did have the advantage of providing ‘a cohesive Vorticist aesthetic’. Jessica Dismorr and Dorothy Shakespear (Ezra Pound's wife) joined a slightly broader range of artists that also included
Jacob Kramer Jacob Kramer (26 December 1892 – 4 February 1962)''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' was a Russian Empire-born painter who spent all of his working life in England. Early life Jacob Kramer was born in the small town of Klintsy, then ...
and Nevinson. Lewis's rhetoric was more cautious this time – trying to avoid being seen by the readership as unpatriotic. Understandably, he tried to strike an optimist tone with regard to the future of Vorticism and ''BLAST''; however, within a year most of the artists had enlisted or volunteered in the armed forces: Lewis – Royal Garrison Artillery; Roberts – Royal Field Artillery; Wadsworth – British Naval Intelligence; Bomberg – Royal Engineers; Dismorr – Voluntary Air Detachment; and Saunders – government office work.


Vorticists at the Penguin Club

Ezra Pound had been championing Wyndham Lewis's work from 1915 with a successful New York lawyer and art collector, John Quinn. Relying on Pound's recommendations, a New York Vorticist exhibition was built around forty-six works by Lewis – some already in Quinn's collection – with additional work by Etchells, Roberts, Dismorr, Saunders and Wadsworth. The exhibition was to be at an artist-run establishment, the Penguin Club in New York. Pound arranged for the transportation of works across the Atlantic, and Quinn took on the entire exhibition costs. Quinn had already selected works that he was interested in buying, but after the exhibition, as no works had sold, he eventually purchased most of the larger items.


War artists

There was almost no opportunity for the rebel artists to work creatively while in active service. However, Wadsworth, unexpectedly, was able to pursue his artistic interests through the supervision of the dazzle camouflage being applied to over two thousand ships, largely at Bristol and Liverpool. Towards the end of the war the journalist
Paul Konody Paul George Konody (30 July 1872 – 30 November 1933) was a Hungarian-born, London-based art critic and historian, who wrote for several London newspapers, as well as writing numerous books and articles on noted artists and collections, with a ...
, now art adviser to the Canadian War Memorials Fund (and someone who had been blatantly anti-Vorticism), commissioned Lewis, Wadsworth, Nevinson, Bomberg, Roberts, Paul Nash and Bomberg to produce monumental canvases on subjects relating to the Canadian war experience for a projected memorial hall in Ottawa. The artists were warned that only 'representative' work would be acceptable, and indeed Bomberg's first version of his ''Sappers at Work'' was rejected as being 'too cubist'. Despite these restrictions, the extraordinary canvases feel uncompromisingly modernist, and certainly drew from pre-war avant-garde practices.


Group X

In the post-war years it was difficult for artists to receive patronage and to secure sales. Nevertheless, Lewis, Wadsworth, Roberts and Atkinson all had one-man shows by the early 1920s – each artist navigating his own path between modernism and potentially more saleable recognisable subjects. Lewis organised one more group show, in 1920 at the Mansard Gallery, bringing together ten artists under the banner ' Group X'. Now, however, there was little attempt to unify the artists's contributions beyond Lewis's belief that 'the experiments y artistsundertaken all over Europe during the last ten years should .... not be lightly abandoned.' The diversity of styles on display, for example, included four self-portraits by Lewis, while Roberts exhibited four quite radical works in his evolving 'Cubist' style. Six of the Group X artists had been in the 'Vorticist' group – Dismorr, Etchells, Hamilton, Lewis, Roberts and Wadsworth – and they were joined by the sculptor
Frank Dobson Frank Gordon Dobson (15 March 1940 – 11 November 2019) was a British Labour Party politician. As Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St. Pancras from 1979 to 2015, he served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Health from 1997 t ...
, the painter
Charles Ginner Charles Isaac Ginner (4 March 1878 – 6 January 1952) was a British painter of landscape and urban subjects. Born in the south of France at Cannes, of British parents, in 1910 he settled in London, where he was an associate of Spencer Gore a ...
, the American graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, and the painter John Turnbull. The exhibition was mainly seen as a failure to 'rekindle a flame of adventure'.


Legacy

The disruption of war and the subsequent mobilisation of the artists contributed to a situation whereby many of the larger Vorticist paintings were lost. An anecdote recorded by Brigid Peppin relates how Helen Saunders's sister used a Vorticist oil to cover her larder floor and ' t wasworn to destruction' – an extreme example of how the paintings were not appreciated. When John Quinn died, in 1927, his collection of Vorticist works was auctioned and dissipated to now untraceable purchasers, presumably in America. Writing in 1974, Richard Cork noted that 'thirty-eight of the forty-nine works displayed by the full members of the movement at the 1915 Vorticist Exhibition are now missing.' Despite a resurgence of abstract art in Britain in the middle years of the twentieth century, the contribution of Vorticism was largely forgotten until a spat between
John Rothenstein Sir John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein (11 July 1901 – 27 February 1992) was a British arts administrator and art historian. Biography John Rothenstein was born in London in 1901, the son of Sir William Rothenstein. The family was connect ...
of the
Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
and William Roberts blew up in the press. Rothenstein's 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition 'Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism' was actually a Lewis retrospective with very few Vorticist works. And the inclusion of work by Bomberg, Roberts, Wadsworth, Nevinson, Dobson, Kramer under the heading 'Other Vorticists' – together with Lewis's assertion that 'Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period' – incensed Roberts as it seemed that he and the others were being set up to be mere disciples of Lewis. The case made by Roberts in the five 'Vorticist Pamphlets' that he published between 1956 and 1958 was hampered by the absence of key works, but led to other self-published books by Roberts which included early studies of his abstract work. A broader survey was provided by the d'Offay Couper Gallery's 'Abstract Art in England 1913–1914' exhibition in 1969. Five years later, the exhibition 'Vorticism and Its Allies' curated by Richard Cork at the Hayward Gallery, London, went further in painstakingly bringing together paintings, drawings, sculpture (including a reconstruction of Epstein's Rock Drill 1913–15), Omega Workshop artefacts, photographs, journals, catalogues, letters and cartoons. Cork also included twenty-five 'Vortographs' from 1917 by the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn that had been first displayed at the Camera Club in London in 1918.


Recent exhibitions

More recently, in 2004 in London and Manchester, 'Blasting the Future!: Vorticism in Britain 1910–1920' explored the links between Vorticism and Futurism, and a major exhibition 'The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World' in 2010–11 brought Vorticist work to Italy for the first time and to America for the first time since 1917, as well as appearing in London.Exhibition dates: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina, 30 September 2010–2 January 2011;
Peggy Guggenheim Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim ( ; August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemian and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down wi ...
Collection, Venice, 29 January–15 May 2011; and Tate Britain, 14 June–4 September 2011.
The curators, Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, had also traced some previously lost works (such as three paintings by Helen Saunders) that were included in the exhibition.


Notes


References

* Antcliffe, Mark, and Greene, Vivien (eds.), ''The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World'' (London: Tate Publishing, 2010) * Black, Jonathan (ed.), ''Blasting the Future!: Vorticism in Britain 1910–1920'' (London: Philip Wilson, 2004) * Cork, Richard, ''Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age'' (two volumes) (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery and Berkeley:
University of California Press The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...
, 1976) * Cork, Richard, ''Vorticism and Its Allies'' (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974) * Haycock, David Boyd, ''A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War''. (London: Old Street Publishing, 2009) * Pound, Ezra., 'Vorticism', in ''Fortnightly Review'' 96, no. 573 (1914), pp. 461–71


External links


Ezra Pound's 1914 Vorticism essay
in the ''Fortnightly Review''
Ezra Pound, ''Vorticism''
exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 3 July – 19 October 2008
Tate glossary

A review of the 2011 Vorticism exhibition at Tate Britain
by Professor Andrew Thacker.
An English Cubist: William Roberts 1895–1980
{{Ezra Pound Ezra Pound Wyndham Lewis Futurist movements Modern art British art movements