THE VORTICIST MOVEMENT at the Tate Britain
THE VORTICIST MOVEMENT at the Tate Britain The Vorticist Movement flourished in Britain in the years immediately before and during WW1, culminating in the second and last edition of Blast , the movement's journal and the death of one its major luminaries and activists, the sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915) in the Great War. The American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the Canadian artist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) provided the main dynamic to the group's collective ethos which was aggressive, powerful, incendiary but also adolescent and arrogant. The hysterical manifesto prose style of Blast 1 is unpalatable, unbearably arrogant, bullish, extreme, harsh, verging on angry fascistic ravings (for Pound and Lewis were both to drift to the extreme right after WW1). The movement is paralleled with the Russian Constructivist art movement and Italian Futurism, putatively illegitimate children of the Great War. Blast 1 is characterized by its hysterical, hilarious