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 central figure, Wyndham
Lewis, was a writer as well as painter, and its name was suggested by the American poet Ezra
Pound, 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 Lewis 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; it was the country's first organized movement to encompass abstract art and it subsequently exercised considerable influence on the development of British modernism.
Although Vorticism was not officially launched until 1914, the movement started to take shape in October the previous year, when Lewis and several of his associates left the
Omega Workshops because of a quarrel with Roger
Fry. In April 1914 Lewis formed the short-lived
Rebel Art Centre, and the names of several of the leading ‘rebel’ artists were used (without permission) by
Marinetti in his Futurist manifesto
Vital English Art, published in the
Observer on 7 June 1914 while he was visiting London. This unauthorized appropriation of his name stung Lewis into producing the first issue of his magazine
Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (dated June, but published in July), in which he made a bitter attack on
Vital English Art in the shape of his own
Vorticist Manifesto. In addition to Lewis, the signatories included Jessica
Dismorr, Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound, William
Roberts, and Edward
Wadsworth. The manifesto attacked (‘blasted') a wide range of targets in an attempt to jolt Britain out of its insularity and rid it of its lingering Victorian values.
Although Lewis dissociated himself so vehemently from Marinetti, the exuberant typography of
Blast was clearly influenced by Futurism, which was also one of the main sources for the paintings and sculptures produced by the Vorticists (even the word ‘vortex’ had been used by the Futurists, notably in the title of some of
Boccioni's paintings). Lewis criticized Futurism as melodramatic, but it—like Vorticism—was essentially concerned with showing the energy of modern life. However, whilst Futurist paintings often involved blurring of forms to suggest speed, Vorticist paintings were characteristically hard, harsh and angular, evoking what
Blast called ‘the forms of machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works'. Because Vorticism shared some of the loud aggressiveness of Futurism, the word is sometimes associated with ceaseless, swirling energy, but to Lewis the Vortex was a still centre in the maelstrom of life, and however explosive his paintings are, they are always lucidly constructed, with a feeling of intellectual rigour rather than emotional abandon. Lewis attacked Cubism as well as Futurism, but the fragmentation of forms characteristic of Vorticism was undoubtedly indebted to Cubism.
The Vorticists held only one exhibition, at the Doré Gallery, London, in June 1915. Apart from the formal members, 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 an associate of the movement. Several of the artists represented in the exhibition were by now producing pure abstracts; the show was far too advanced for the critics and was ‘treated as an incomprehensible joke devoid of all serious merit’ (‘Vorticism and its Allies', Hayward Gallery, London, 1974). The second (and final) number of
Blast appeared in July 1915, by which time the war was scattering the Vorticists and breaking up the movement ( Gaudier-Brzeska had already been killed in action). Pound did his best to keep its spirit alive. He persuaded the American collector John
Quinn to buy Vorticist works ( Quinn even staged a Vorticist exhibition in New York in 1917) and he encouraged the American-born photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966), who had settled in Britain in 1912, to experiment with semi-abstract photographic equivalents of Vorticist paintings—‘Vortographs', produced by taking the image through a prismatic arrangement of mirrors. When Lewis returned from war service he made rather half-hearted plans for a third issue of
Blast, but nothing materialized, and his attempt to revive Vorticism in 1919 as
Group X was a failure.
Lewis was the dominant figure of the movement, both as an artist and as a theorist, and he later claimed that ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period’ (introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists', Tate Gallery, London, 1956). However, there was clearly a close similarity of style between his paintings and those of several of his associates, one of whom— William Roberts—vigorously disputed his claims. Roberts was only one of the other Vorticists who produced work of memorable quality, so he was fully justified in insisting they should not be dismissed as minor acolytes.
