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, extreme manifesto (the manifesto was the favoured summary of any avante garde art movement in this period and still persists. Take for instance the recent Stuckist manifesto.):
1. Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves.
2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes.
3. We discharge ourselves on both sides.
There's more but this offers an overall impression of the group's writing, simultaneously doing the fingers at the Establishment while also being inherently more conforming and obedient than its members.
Women such as Julie Dismorr and Helen Sanders were central figures of the movement but most of their work has been lost, as the exhibition tells us. Perhaps more could have been made of their involvement even though the overall impression that the movement gave was its hardness, adolescent outlook, arrogant, narrow-minded, male. Presumably Pound failed to transpose his background in small town, mid America to the cultural metropolis of London or Paris as both he and Lewis paradoxically harked after elites while eschewing elitism but Vorticism is not just their story.
Some of the key locations of the movement were the Rebel Art Centre in London founded by Wyndham Lewis, the Dore Galleries in New Bond Street, where some of the first exhibitions of Vorticist art were arranged, the La Tour Eiffel Restaurant in Percy Street, central London, a popular haunt of the Vorticists and the Camera Club. These are detailed by the exhibition as the movement moved restlessly from location to location. The Great English Vortex ended as suddenly as it began with only two copies of Blast ever produced yet it managed to establish, in embryo, the course of 20th century culture, the poetry of T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, Lewis's paintings and writing. Other marginal figures such as Richard Nevinson and Frederick Etchells are also celebrated as intrinsic rebels within seeming outward conformists. Their subject was the tragedy of WW1 as futurist images melt into lines of infantry, trenches and all the needless devices of death and destruction.
The formula of historical retrospectives at the Tate Britain is now faintly predictable, perhaps needing more energy or engagement to make us think a bit more deeply about the subject matter depicted.
Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, July 2011
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, extreme manifesto (the manifesto was the favoured summary of any avante garde art movement in this period and still persists. Take for instance the recent Stuckist manifesto.):
1. Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves.
2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes.
3. We discharge ourselves on both sides.
There's more but this offers an overall impression of the group's writing, simultaneously doing the fingers at the Establishment while also being inherently more conforming and obedient than its members.
Women such as Julie Dismorr and Helen Sanders were central figures of the movement but most of their work has been lost, as the exhibition tells us. Perhaps more could have been made of their involvement even though the overall impression that the movement gave was its hardness, adolescent outlook, arrogant, narrow-minded, male. Presumably Pound failed to transpose his background in small town, mid America to the cultural metropolis of London or Paris as both he and Lewis paradoxically harked after elites while eschewing elitism but Vorticism is not just their story.
Some of the key locations of the movement were the Rebel Art Centre in London founded by Wyndham Lewis, the Dore Galleries in New Bond Street, where some of the first exhibitions of Vorticist art were arranged, the La Tour Eiffel Restaurant in Percy Street, central London, a popular haunt of the Vorticists and the Camera Club. These are detailed by the exhibition as the movement moved restlessly from location to location. The Great English Vortex ended as suddenly as it began with only two copies of Blast ever produced yet it managed to establish, in embryo, the course of 20th century culture, the poetry of T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, Lewis's paintings and writing. Other marginal figures such as Richard Nevinson and Frederick Etchells are also celebrated as intrinsic rebels within seeming outward conformists. Their subject was the tragedy of WW1 as futurist images melt into lines of infantry, trenches and all the needless devices of death and destruction.
The formula of historical retrospectives at the Tate Britain is now faintly predictable, perhaps needing more energy or engagement to make us think a bit more deeply about the subject matter depicted.
Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, July 2011
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