The Crowd (1914-15) by Wyndham Lewis: a typical Vorticist painting “filled with lean, clear-cut vivacity and exhilarating colour”
A century ago, rebellious young artists across Europe banded together in a succession of loudly publicised avant-garde movements. After Expressionism had erupted in Germany, Cubism revolutionised painting in France. Then the Futurists came out of Italy, demanding that art should celebrate the blurred excitement of machine-age dynamism. Rival groups issued manifestos, proclaiming their ability to transform everyone’s vision of the modern era. The years leading up to the first world war were alive with the energy of all these conflicting “-isms,” and in the summer of 1914 a new British movement was announced by a belligerent magazine called BLAST. This publication marked the arrival of Vorticism, and it burst on the world with the impact of a bomb. The thick, black capitals peppering its pages had the force of a loudhailer. The images reproduced in BLAST proved that British art was being revolutionised by a fresh, London-based generation of painters and sculptors dedicated to extreme, urgent renewal. They wanted to sweep away the inhibiting legacy of the “VICTORIAN VAMPIRE,” and now the summer exhibition at Tate Britain intends to celebrate the landmark importance of the Vorticists’ achievement. Although many of their key works are either lost or destroyed, enough survive to reveal the group’s vitality and daring at full stretch. Tate is devoting its first-ever major show to Vorticism, highlighting the movement’s significance and revealing in particular how BLAST managed to broadcast its groundbreaking ideas. Like the Expressionists, Cubists and Futurists, the Vorticists were in a hurry. Some of them had only just graduated from the Slade School of Art in London, and the exuberant iconoclasm of BLAST was powered by a healthy disrespect for their elders. The Vorticists were convinced that Britain had more of a right than any other nation to convey the essential character of the 20th century in its art. The BLAST manifestos proudly reminded readers that “the Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius—its appearance and its spirit. Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else.” Inspired by the inventiveness and drive that had made Britain the crucible of the industrial revolution, the Vorticists placed the machine-age world at the heart of the work they produced. Like the Futurists, they believed that a new art in an emergent century should reflect the dramatically changing character of contemporary life. Unlike the Futurists, though, they did not view modern existence with rhapsodic enthusiasm. A typical Vorticist painting like Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd (top) is filled with lean, clear-cut vivacity and exhilarating colour. But it takes a hard, critical view of mechanised prowess. Dehumanisation is a key theme, and so is a violence that threatens to burst through the boundaries of the picture. The Vorticists were bound to scorn the unqualified romanticism of the Futurists, whose country had begun to experience machine-age transformation at a far later stage. Wyndham Lewis’s triple role, as artist, theorist and editor of BLAST, is central to understanding Vorticism. A decade older than most members of the movement, he rallied them to the rebellious cause and wrote trenchant essays about its aims. He also drew copiously, and the emphatic force of his line will give the Tate show a steely assurance from the outset. But Ezra Pound, the radical young American poet who had made pre-war London his home, christened the movement in the early months of 1914. Pound wrote in BLAST that “the vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.” He saw the vortex as a whirling force, which would draw together the most vital innovatory energies of the time and crystallise them in a rigidly immobile centre. Pound described it as “a radiant node or cluster… from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” Wyndham Lewis explained his idea of the vortex by telling a friend to think of a whirlpool: “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist.”
A century ago, rebellious young artists across Europe banded together in a succession of loudly publicised avant-garde movements. After Expressionism had erupted in Germany, Cubism revolutionised painting in France. Then the Futurists came out of Italy, demanding that art should celebrate the blurred excitement of machine-age dynamism. Rival groups issued manifestos, proclaiming their ability to transform everyone’s vision of the modern era. The years leading up to the first world war were alive with the energy of all these conflicting “-isms,” and in the summer of 1914 a new British movement was announced by a belligerent magazine called BLAST. This publication marked the arrival of Vorticism, and it burst on the world with the impact of a bomb. The thick, black capitals peppering its pages had the force of a loudhailer. The images reproduced in BLAST proved that British art was being revolutionised by a fresh, London-based generation of painters and sculptors dedicated to extreme, urgent renewal. They wanted to sweep away the inhibiting legacy of the “VICTORIAN VAMPIRE,” and now the summer exhibition at Tate Britain intends to celebrate the landmark importance of the Vorticists’ achievement. Although many of their key works are either lost or destroyed, enough survive to reveal the group’s vitality and daring at full stretch. Tate is devoting its first-ever major show to Vorticism, highlighting the movement’s significance and revealing in particular how BLAST managed to broadcast its groundbreaking ideas. Like the Expressionists, Cubists and Futurists, the Vorticists were in a hurry. Some of them had only just graduated from the Slade School of Art in London, and the exuberant iconoclasm of BLAST was powered by a healthy disrespect for their elders. The Vorticists were convinced that Britain had more of a right than any other nation to convey the essential character of the 20th century in its art. The BLAST manifestos proudly reminded readers that “the Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius—its appearance and its spirit. Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else.” Inspired by the inventiveness and drive that had made Britain the crucible of the industrial revolution, the Vorticists placed the machine-age world at the heart of the work they produced. Like the Futurists, they believed that a new art in an emergent century should reflect the dramatically changing character of contemporary life. Unlike the Futurists, though, they did not view modern existence with rhapsodic enthusiasm. A typical Vorticist painting like Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd (top) is filled with lean, clear-cut vivacity and exhilarating colour. But it takes a hard, critical view of mechanised prowess. Dehumanisation is a key theme, and so is a violence that threatens to burst through the boundaries of the picture. The Vorticists were bound to scorn the unqualified romanticism of the Futurists, whose country had begun to experience machine-age transformation at a far later stage. Wyndham Lewis’s triple role, as artist, theorist and editor of BLAST, is central to understanding Vorticism. A decade older than most members of the movement, he rallied them to the rebellious cause and wrote trenchant essays about its aims. He also drew copiously, and the emphatic force of his line will give the Tate show a steely assurance from the outset. But Ezra Pound, the radical young American poet who had made pre-war London his home, christened the movement in the early months of 1914. Pound wrote in BLAST that “the vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.” He saw the vortex as a whirling force, which would draw together the most vital innovatory energies of the time and crystallise them in a rigidly immobile centre. Pound described it as “a radiant node or cluster… from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” Wyndham Lewis explained his idea of the vortex by telling a friend to think of a whirlpool: “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist.”
'The Mud Bath' by David Bomberg. Photo: John Webb
A lifelong satirist, Lewis soon developed the robotic figures whose mask-like faces and metallic muscles appear in many of his images. But he also became fascinated by the urban jungle of the machine-age city. As The Crowd reveals, he often placed his angular people in the context of a metropolis based on New York’s pioneering skyscrapers. Photographs of Manhattan by Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose later Vortographs showed how Vorticism could lead the camera towards abstraction, helped to shape Lewis’s vision in a very decisive way. None of the large canvases produced by Vorticism’s other members still exists. But the related works on paper by Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth provide a tense, brittle and powerfully organised idea of what their paintings must have looked like. Some of Saunders’s fiercely combative watercolours, like Balance, have recently been discovered and will now be shown in London for the first time. She returns time and again to gesticulating figures with claw-like hands. Their energy often seems powered by anguish, and she favours acid colours which sharpen her distinctive designs. Roberts’s study for Two Step is also admirable, a brilliant little watercolour where frantically dancing figures appear to be caught up in the greater dynamism of the surrounding city. Wadsworth’s woodcuts are superb, too, exploring the jagged forms of industrial buildings from his native Yorkshire. The print medium encouraged him to discover how the same subject could be transformed by different colour combinations, in images more gentle than Lewis’s aggressive work. Two sculptors were associated with Vorticism. Like Pound, they were both foreigners. Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who came to London from the US and France respectively, may have gained some of their appetite for renewal from their vantage as outsiders. The two invaded British sculpture and opened it up to an immense range of possibilities. Gaudier-Brzeska, the younger of the two, is the maker of small, fluent and astonishingly precocious carvings. Whether working in marble, brass, alabaster or Portland stone, he is ever-resourceful and impossible to pin down. Pound admired him intensely, commissioning him to carve a simplified Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound which showed the young sculptor’s talent on a larger scale. Epstein insisted on remaining at a remove from the Vorticist group. But his prodigious Rock Drill (below) makes absolute sense within this exhibition. The first version, where a white plaster driller was daringly mounted on a real machine, sums up the Vorticist vision of mechanised humanity. It displays, through the brazenly phallic drill, Epstein’s determination to break through sexual taboos.'Rock Drill' 1913-15, Jacob Epstein. Photo: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features
But he became dissatisfied with this titanic sculpture. Soon after it was exhibited in 1915, Epstein discarded the drill, lopped off the driller’s legs and dispensed with his right forearm. In this way, the once-superhuman robot was turned into a tragic victim called Torso in Metal From the Rock Drill, a man now incapable of defending either himself or the embryonic child lodged so surprisingly within his exposed ribcage. Why did Epstein change this sculpture? I believe that the first world war played a decisive role. The first version was made before hostilities commenced, but the final bronze version is akin to a wounded soldier, one of many whose lives were smashed in the appalling carnage at the western front. Ultimately, the war wrecked Vorticism, too. In 1915 Gaudier-Brzeska, who had volunteered for the French army, was killed in battle at the age of 23. His loss shocked the allies he had left behind in London. They managed to produce only one more issue of BLAST, and organise a single Vorticist exhibition in London. The curators of the Tate’s new show throw fresh light on the exhibition held in 1917 by the Vorticists at the Penguin Club in New York, where their work was purchased by the US collector John Quinn. By 1918, however, the movement had come to an end. The destruction wrought by machine-age weapons changed the Vorticists’ vision forever. They were themselves blasted, but not before their harsh, audacious and challenging work had pushed British art into a fierce engagement with the modern age.
