‘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.’
Wyndham Lewis, 1914
In 1914, artist and writer Wyndham Lewis formed Vorticism, a new London-based modernist art movement comprised of geometric forms and harsh lines. Lewis aimed to create a new form of art for a changing, vibrant modern world, encapsulating the energy and movement of city life dominated by the fast pace brought on by the industrial revolution. The term ‘Vorticism’ was coined by American poet Ezra Pound, for whom 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.’
For Lewis, the vortex becomes the point of maximum energy that his painting seeks to reflect, giving form to the whirlpool or ‘chaos’ in the form of hard-edged abstraction. His and other vorticists’ ensuing work therefore both resembles and depicts that chaos, and draws the viewer’s attention directly to a central point in the canvas. Lewis publicly launched the movement through his radical journal Blast.
In his painting the Workshop above, Lewis uses bold angles and diagonal lines to evoke the geometry of modern buildings. Bright pinks and yellows are juxtaposed with earthy, neutral tones, perhaps to reflect both the intensity and vitality of London life as well as the monotony of machine-driven industry. The work is thus also an image of industrial England – indeed Britain was commonly referred to as ‘The Workshop of the World’ at the time. Black lines emphasise the sharp edges of the work, adding to the painting’s dynamism, and draw your eye to the central point. This dark blue form roughly in the centre of the frame is suggestive of the night’s sky, just visible above the mass of buildings that bear down on the city-dweller.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson’s The Soul of the Soulless City (‘New York – an Abstraction’) completed in 1920, above, has many similarities in style to Lewis’ vorticism. His scene shows the energy of the modern metropolis, with two railway lines converging to a central point flanked by slightly abstracted skyscrapers that rise right up to the top of the canvas and again enshroud the viewer. However, despite befriending Lewis upon graduating from the Slade School of Art, the pair immediately fell out when Nevinson referred his art to Futurism. It was in fact after this point that Lewis founded ‘Vorticism’ with other ‘rebel’ artists, from which Nevinson was then excluded. The darker colour, more monochrome colour palette differs from Lewis’ work, although brighter shades of orange are still evocative of the city’s vigour.
More widely, the ‘vortex’ could also be seen as a metaphor for artistic and intellectual activity in London, and several of the Vorticists were, like Lewis, writers as well as artists. Jessica Dismorr was one such member of the group, who also contributed to the movement’s journal Blast. She exhibited as part of the group’s exhibitions, and was one of the group’s core members. Alongside Helen Saunders, it was striking that the pair were included, as female artists. Dismorr’s work has more depth that some of the other, more traditionally ‘flat’ vorticists, setting her style apart. Her work above depicts a series of shapes suggestive of arches and other elements of supportive infrastructure, floating in a dark, undefined space.
Despite the vorticists’ links to Italian Futurism, they were determined to be set apart. Lewis and others did not share the futurists’ emphasis on speed, or their romanticism of technology. Their paintings do not show the machine-age in a celebratory way, but are marked by a rather more matter-of-fact attitude. In contrast to the futurists, the vorticists do not seek to glorify modernity but rather to simply represent it, its energy that is simultaneously its chaos.
The sharp, angular forms found in Vorticism can also be linked to the modernist architecture that developed in the early twentieth-century. Harsh materials such as steel, concrete or glass are utilised, with designs creating minimalist buildings marked by structural, angular elements as a backlash to ornament and decorative architecture. Modernist architecture continued to develop over the following decades and became dominant after World War II, and was followed by brutalist architecture that emerged in Britain in the 1950s, which was further inspired by utilitarian, low-cost design.