Vorticism

Vorticism. An avant-garde British art movement launched in 1914; it was related to Cubism and Futurism and was mainly concerned with the visual arts, but it also embraced literature (its name was suggested by the American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885–1972), to whom the vortex represented ‘the point of maximum energy’, an expression of the dynamism of modern life). Vorticism was highly aggressive in tone, celebrating movement and the machine, and attacking what was considered the complacency and sentimentality of contemporary British culture. It was short-lived, its vigour being dissipated by the First World War, but it had a powerful, revitalizing impact on British art. The central figure of the movement, as a theorist as well as an artist, was Wyndham Lewis, who edited its journal Blast (only two numbers appeared, in 1914 and 1915). He later claimed that ‘Vorticism…was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period’, but there was clearly a close similarity of style between his harsh, angular, mechanistic paintings and the work of several of his associates, including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth, each of whom signed the Vorticist manifesto that appeared in the first number of Blast.

The Vorticists held only one exhibition, at the Doré Gallery, London, in June 1915. Apart from the formal members of the movement, the artists taking part included David Bomberg and Christopher Nevinson. Jacob Epstein was not included, but his work was reproduced in Blast and he is generally considered part of the movement. Several of the artists represented in the exhibition were now producing pure abstracts, and the show was far too advanced for the critics, who treated it as an incomprehensible joke. By this time the war was scattering the Vorticists ( Gaudier-Breszka had already been killed in action), and Lewis failed in his attempts to revive the movement after the war.