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 Blast 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's Futurism and the Post-Impressionism of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops.For a full account of Vorticism see the introductory essay by Richard Cork in the exhibition catalogue Vorticism and Its Allies (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974), pp. 5–26. A recent and concise definition is available at the Tate's website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/v/vorticism.
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'.As opposed to sculpting in wax to produce casts or using mechanised tools to 'translate clay into marble'. Mark Antliff, 'Sculpural Nominalism/Anarchist Vortex: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound', in Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene (eds.), The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), p. 52.
Prelude to Vorticism
In the summer of 1913 Roger Fry, with Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, set up the Omega Workshops in Fitzrovia – 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. Lewis had made an impact at the Allied Artists' Salon the previous year with a huge virtually abstract work, Kermesse (now lost),Clive Bell in The Athenaeum of 27 July 1912 explained that, in order to appreciate this work, visitors 'having shed all irrelevant prejudices in favour of representation will be able to contemplate it as a piece of pure design'. and in the same year he had worked with the American sculptor Jacob Epstein 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.The Camden Town Group: An Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others, Public Art Galleries, Brighton, December 1913–January 1914. 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.'Quoted by Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 12.
Rebel artists
A quarrel with Roger Fry provided Lewis with a pretext to leave the Omega Workshops and set up a rival organisation.Karin Orchard, '"A Laugh Like a Bomb": The History and Ideas of the Vorticists', in Paul Edwards (ed.), Blast: Vorticism 1914–1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 15. Financed by Lewis's painter friend Kate Lechmere, the Rebel Art Centre was established in March 1914 at 38 Great Ormond Street.Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 17. 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) and the Italian 'Futurist', Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. 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.Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 20.
When Marinetti and the English Futurist C. R. W. Nevinson published a manifesto of 'Vital English Art',The Observer, 7 June 1914. 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 and Futurism'.The Spectator, 13 June 1914.
Inventing Vorticism
Ezra Pound had introduced the concept of 'the vortex' in relation to modernist poetry and art early on in 1914.Initially in correspondence in late 1913 and then in an informal talk at the Rebel Art Centre in April 1914 (Philip Rylands, 'Introduction', in Antliff & Greene (eds.), The Vorticists, p. 25, n. 33). 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: '[The vortex was] that 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.'Ezra Pound in a 1915 interview for the Russian journal Strelets, quoted in Rylands, 'Introduction', p. 23. 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 – 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 had met Ezra Pound in July 1913,Mark Antliff, 'Sculptural Nominalism/Anarchist Vortex', in Antliff & Greene (eds.), The Vorticists, p. 47. and their ideas on 'The New Sculpture'Published in The Egoist, 16 February 1914, pp. 67–8, and 16 March 1914, pp. 117–18. developed into a theory of Vorticist sculpture. Two 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.Brigid Peppin, 'Women That a Movement Forgot', Tate, Etc. 22 (summer 2011), p. 35.
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.William Roberts, Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work 1913–1920 (London, 1957), p. 9. Reproductions of these paintings were included in the first issue of BLAST.
BLAST
Although the Rebel Art Centre was short-lived,It closed later in 1914 following paranoia, jealousy and squabbling especially with regard to the relationship between Kate Latchmere and Wyndham Lewis and T. E. Hulme – see, Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 17. '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'Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 21. at the Dieudonné Hotel in the St James's area of London on 15 July 1914.The Dieudonné (the 'God-Given') was a French-run hotel at 9–11 Ryder Street (now part of Christie's building in King Street). It closed later in 1914. In William Roberts's large painting from 1961–2 The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915, Roberts represents the BLAST launch as being at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in Percy Street, Fitzrovia. Richard Cork clarifies that the painting is an 'imaginative evocation' of the event 'rather than a historically accurate record ... . [however] the Tour Eiffel's genial proprietor, Rudolphe Stulik, was always lavish with his hospitality towards the Vorticists; and Roberts ... . testified that "in my memory la cuisine Française and Vorticism are indissolubly linked"' – Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, pp. 106–7. The magazine was mainly the work of Lewis, but also included extensive written pieces by Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, 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.BLAST can be viewed online from many sources, including https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf. The manifesto was apparently 'signed' by eleven signatories.Under 'Signatures for Manifesto' on page 43 of BLAST No.1 were listed 'R. Aldington', 'Arbuthnot', 'L. Atkinson', 'Gaudier Brzeska', 'J. Dismorr', 'C. Hamilton', 'E. Pound', 'W. Roberts', 'H. Sanders' (sic), 'E. Wadsworth' and 'Wyndham Lewis'. 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.Roberts, Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work, p. 9. 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.Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p. 24.
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.Opened 10 June 1915. The forty-nine 'Vorticist' works by Dismorr, Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis,One of the few surviving paintings from this exhibition is Wyndham Lewis's Workshop c.1914–15 in the Tate collection. Roberts,Study for William Roberts's Two Step. SaundersHelen Saunders, c.1915 Vorticist Design in the Tate collection. 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.Those listed as having been 'invited to show' were Bernard Adeney, Lawrence Atkinson, Bomberg, Duncan Grant, Jacob Kramer and Nevinson (labelled 'Futurist').
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.'Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, p.25 The exhibition was largely ignored by the press, and the reviews that did appear were damning.For example, P. G. Konody in The Observer, 4 July 1915: 'the "Vorticists" continue their antics in times as serious and critical as the present.'
BLAST: War Number