In the years before the first world war, London saw several explosive exhibitions that shattered the generally conservative – indeed, backward – tenor of much British art. They culminated in June 1915, after the war was well under way, with the only exhibition held by the vorticist artists who gathered around the dynamic lead of Wyndham Lewis. In its way, it was the most avant-garde show London had ever experienced.
In 1910, French impressionism, already 40 years old, was still widely viewed with suspicion in Britain. Some younger painters adopted its flickering, mutable brushstrokes but hardly understood its implications of innovative form and colour. But just as it was beginning to gain some hold with the public, an exhibition in late 1910 entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists dropped a bomb on this unsuspecting landscape, by showing paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh (all dead by then), alongside young turks of the Paris art world such as Matisse, Derain and Picasso. While disdain and abuse issued from the cultured air-raid shelters of the establishment, younger painters and critics (and even one or two collectors) could not fail to take an enthusiastic interest.
In the following two years, a fuller picture of contemporary European art became more available. The Italian futurists banged their drum in the normally sedate Sackville Gallery in London’s West End, causing consternation even among the new acolytes of post-impressionism. For a moment, however, painters such as Severini, Marinetti and Boccioni were feted and – with often unfortunate results – imitated.
In late 1912 came the Second Post-Impressionist exhibition, which included a magnificent array of works by Matisse, Picasso and Braque, and sections devoted to Russian and British artists. The temperature rose and works by Kandinsky and Brancusi appeared for the first time in several group exhibitions in London. Adventurous young artists were dazed by the variety of styles on offer and the tags of post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism were promiscuously bandied about in the press.
In looking back at these years it is easy to overcompartmentalise, with each movement distinct and vying for attention. The overlaps were considerable and there were influences to contend with nearer to home. Walter Sickert, for example, who was 52 in 1912, worked in a style marinated in the low tones of Whistler and the observational sharps and flats of the work of his friend Degas. In 1911, an exhibition he had held in London was condemned, not so much for any radical stylistic departures, but for its subject matter of seedy or even sordid interiors frequently containing uncompromisingly naked women on cheap bedsteads. Such frank realism found a following among younger painters such as Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore who, with Sickert as godfather, founded the Camden Town Group. One of its unlikely exhibitors was Wyndham Lewis, another was Duncan Grant, but neither could be termed a modern realist.
Lewis had no desire to be led. This he noisily and publicly proved when he and three other artists – Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells and Cuthbert Hamilton – abruptly left the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry’s design business in Fitzroy Square, where all four worked part-time, accusing Fry of underhand chicanery over an important commission for the Omega. A vicious “round robin”, written by Lewis and signed by the four artists, was printed and circulated in October 1913. The so-far amicable, if uneasy, relationship that had existed between Lewis and Fry promptly ceased. Lewis soon set up his own “workshop”, the Rebel Art Centre, at 38 Great Ormond Street, which has the best claim of anywhere to be the birthplace of vorticism.
The narrative of vorticism is brief. The word emerged in the press around June 1914, from the use of the term vortex. This seems to have first been coined by the American poet Ezra Pound, then living in London and a supporter of “vital English art”. He had used it to characterise the seemingly unstoppable twister of energy and innovation into which creative artists were drawn in pre-war London. The storm-chasers included Pound himself, Jacob Epstein and TS Eliot, both also from America, the young French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and, as frequent visitors, the Italian futurists Marinetti and Severini. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina its star dancers, put on dazzling and successful seasons in London in 1913 and 1914. There was unrestricted travel between Britain and the continent and many modernist shows in Paris were reviewed in the British press. It is against this teeming background that vorticism jumped from its chrysalis.
Pictorially, it was a style of clear forms, linear and hard edged, using unmodulated colour that was frequently independent of any representational value and, for the most part, secondary to the drawing. It reflected the energy of modern life as manifest in machinery, factories and the docks, popular music and dance. But it rejected the romantic-descriptive elements that characterised the futurists’ stress on speed and movement. As their apologist, the poet and critic TE Hulme, wrote: “Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.” Vorticism was to be unsentimental, objective, impersonal.
Abstraction was the way forward. For vorticists such as Wadsworth and Etchells, completely abstract design had been their practice at the Omega Workshops. In their contemporary easel paintings, however, the idiom had not been fully achieved. But by mid to late 1914, recognisable imagery virtually disappeared. To be sure, a residue lingers – the metal facets of a machine tool, a chessboard, rooftops, a map, the piano in Lewis’s syncopated Red Duet or the dancing couple in William Roberts’s Two-Step. These pointers, however, hardly impede a non-figurative reading of such works, nor do they interfere with the energetic propulsion of tightly clustered geometric forms.
The style caught on. Further recruits came to the Rebel Art Centre such as the still shadowy figure of Lawrence Atkinson who flowered brilliantly in 1914-15 and virtually disappeared thereafter; Dorothy Shakespear, who married Pound in 1914 and remained a closely involved amateur; and Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders, who both exhibited remarkably pared-down works in the 1915 vorticist show. Nor should we forget the innovative American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who recorded Lewis, Wadsworth, Pound and others at this time and invented the Vortograph. But one regular visitor to the Rebel Art Centre, CRW Nevinson, blotted his copybook when, with Marinetti, he published an English futurist manifesto and gave the centre as his address under his signature. This caused uproar with Lewis and his colleagues: they completely dissociated themselves from Marinetti and felt no allegiance to the “fuss and hysterics” of futurism. David Bomberg, the most radical painter in London, whose name Nevinson had added to the manifesto’s list of artists he supported, went further and, with characteristic independence, claimed no affiliation with the centre. But, as Lewis well knew, the publicity this little storm generated in the Observer and elsewhere would do no harm when his polemical magazine Blast No 1 was launched a month later in July 1914.
With its startling sans-serif typography, shocking pink cover and exuberant contents, this is one of the great avant-garde publications of European modernism. Besides giving some intellectual coherence to the vorticists’ aims, it lambasted numerous institutions and people representative of the stagnant pool of British culture and society (its class system producing “the most intense snobbery in the world”). It contained pages devoted to those who were “blessed” and those who were “blasted”. Among the former were England’s great ports and its industry, the Salvation Army, James Joyce, music‑hall stars and Kate Lechmere (the vorticists’ financial backer). Among the latter, we find Elgar; the Bishop of London; the British aesthete, Galsworthy; and cod liver oil. There were dismissive words for Picasso and Kandinsky. The second and final issue of Blast, “War Number”, came out a year later, mostly written by Lewis and Pound but notable for its poems by TS Eliot.
Blast remains the most tangible relic of the vorticist ethos and is still, in spite of its callow obscurities and mud slinging, a touchstone of creative protest. Of the exhibition itself, held in a hired venue, the Doré gallery at 35 New Bond Street (now, ironically, the premises of Sotheby’s), there is little that survives – perhaps about a third of the exhibits have been identified from the brief catalogue listing. Further substantial paintings, tantalisingly glimpsed in contemporary photographs, have disappeared, some certainly in America where there was a vorticist show in New York in 1917.
The exhibition was generally ignored in the press or derided in its usual John Bullish manner. Here was a demonstration of “collective insanity”; the paintings had “no raison d’être as works of art”. With the war dominant in every aspect of life, it was little wonder that this abstruse manifestation of what seemed to be an exclusive visual and intellectual no man’s land should have been shunned. It was positively unpatriotic. But the artists were not. One of the exhibitors, Gaudier-Brzeska, was killed in France five days before the show opened on 10 June. Soon afterwards, Wadsworth was in the RNVR in the Mediterranean; later, Lewis and Roberts were on active service; and in September 1917 TE Hulme was killed in Flanders.
Vorticism, which had in some ways visually prophesied the battering and blasting of war and its furious mechanisation, was itself a victim. Lewis tried to revive its corpse in 1920 with a London show called Group X but nothing came of it. The artists were already on divergent trajectories. Nothing could bring back that brief shell-burst of stylistic convergence and single-minded purpose.
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