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VORTICISM ― a modern art movement you may not know
CAMPUS ON THE LAKE
In summer 1914, at the time of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and only weeks before Germany invaded Belgium, Origins of Modernism in Art with Philip Rylands, Ph.D. Vorticism blazed into existence in London. During the cataclysmic years of the Great War, its flames spluttered and eventually, in 1919, winked Mondays at 11 a.m. out. This Anglo-American response to French Cubism and Italian $25 per master class Futurism owed much to the energizing ego of the poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who gave the movement its name, to the leadership of the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), and the philosophy and March 28: Vorticism criticism of T. E. Hulme (1883–1917). The Vorticists exhibited together April 11: Surrealism Part I in June 1915 at the Doré Galleries, London: they were Jessica Dismorr, April 25: Surrealism Part II Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, and Edward Wadsworth. That same year the New York patron John Quinn Esq. began amassing a collection of Vorticist works under Pound’s guidance, and in January 1917 Quinn opened the only other Vorticist exhibition, at the Penguin Club in New York. In February 1917 the American expatriate and Vorticist ally Alvin Langdon Coburn showed his Vortographs — now celebrated as the first abstract photographs — at the Camera Club in London. These exhibitions were complemented by the group’s journal, BLAST (1914–15), which had a significant impact on avant-garde circles in London and New York. Two major avant-gardists, David Bomberg and the American expatriate Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), although they declined membership in the group, created paintings, sculptures, and drawings with clear affinities to Vorticist ideas and imagery. Vorticism is a story of the acceptance and transformation of contemporary European art by young artists working in London. It belongs to the larger history, from 1910 on, of the reception of French Post-Impressionism, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, the Ballets Russes, Cubism, Futurism and Vasily Kandinsky in Britain. Vorticism was the most advanced and the most sharply characterized of the London-based avant-gardes, whether the Bloomsbury Group (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and the artists of the Omega Workshops), Augustus John (admired as a genius and the first British artist to be tagged a PostImpressionist), the Rhythmists (J. D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice, and others), and the Camden Town Group led by Walter Sickert. The faceted angularity of Vorticist figuration was Cubist in origin, but its similarity stopped there. The Cubist exploration of reconfigured form, with a Edward Wadsworth, Abstract narrow repertoire of subjects (the portrait, the disrobed seated model, or the Composition, 1915, gouache, gueridon with still-life clutter), had little to do with Hulme’s, Lewis’s, and Pound’s Tate Britain conviction that a new art signalled radical changes in the machine-based human condition. Vorticist paintings were contemporary with and sometimes more advanced than comparable abstract experiments in Europe by Robert Delaunay, Kandinsky, František Kupka, the Rayonists, Synchromists, and others. In 1914 the avant-garde art that was produced in London with the intellectual apparatus provided by Hulme, Lewis, and Pound, could hold its own against the Europeans—an unthinkable claim four years earlier.
16 Spring 2022 Folio
