The Past is Blasting the Future!
By Selma Stern
A marvellous night took place at the Estorick Collection in London in the first week of February when staff and invitees celebrated the opening of the museum’s exhibition "Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920". Until late in the evening, invitees and seemingly numerous further guests were streaming into the beautiful Georgian building in Canonbury Square to attend the event. The late arrivals were lucky to still get in. The happening was accompanied by London’s excellent Italian catering service Ponti’s. Michael Estorick, the opening’s host and chairman of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, who is presently writing his latest novel, was busy welcoming the crowd and taking their congratulations. Only few hours later, the following day, visitors to the museum kept on streaming in to view the exhibition.
Vorticism is considered to be Britain’s most important art movement of the early twentieth century and the most significant contribution of the UK to the development of Modernism. Initially inspired by Cubism, Futurism and other modernist streams, the movement’s bell-wether Wyndham Lewis (1886-1957) had returned from continental Europe to England where he started this outstanding and explosive artistic line.
While Lewis and those who followed him – including the Imagis poet Ezra Pound ("Say what you will in two/ Words and get thru’/ Long frilly/ Palaver is silly"), Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, C.R.W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth – were the signatories to Vorticism, it was Ezra Pound who coined the term. Thus, in the movement’s manifesto that was published in the first issue of the art-group’s magazine Blast, Pound gave following guidance: "The ‘vortex’ is the point of energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. We use the words ‘greatest efficiency’ in the precise sense – as they would be used in a textbook of MECHANICS. You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions. OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting."
Vorticist art was obviously influenced by cubism and is often compared to the Italian Futurism. The Vorticists were inspired by the pace of modern life and sought to capture the dynamic state of urban, industrial and technological progress. In 1939, almost twenty years after the end of the artistic movement, Lewis wrote about Vorticism: "Vorticism accepted the machine world: that is the point to stress. It sought out machine forms. The pictures of the Vorticists were a sort of machine… It was cheerfully and dogmatically external…" Yet, though Vorticism is clearly related to Futurism and other forms of machine-age artistic waves, it has been pointed out in the Vorticist’s founding manifesto: "Futurism is the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, DISPERSAL." However, like Futurism, which is permanently represented in the Estorick Collection, Vorticism too, captured the zeitgeist of the era before WW I and was soon ended by the war in which Gaudier-Brzeska was killed.
The exhibition "Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920" includes art works by all of the major Vorticists. Thus, the show presents works such as Wyndham Lewis’s Officers and Signallers (1918), which is a loan from London’s Imperial War Museum, Edward Wadsworth’s Liverpool Shipping (1918) from the British Museum, C.R.W. Nevinson’s Dance Hall Scene (c. 1913-14) and David Bomberg’s Ju-Jitsu (c. 1913), both of which belong to London’s Tate collection.
The exhibition, curated by the art historian and Vorticism expert Dr. Jonathan Black, has long been overdue and is surely one of the greatest presently on show in Britain’s capital.
Further Information:
Blasting the future! Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920 from 4 February until 18 April 2004. Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN, website: www.estorickcollection.com, email: curator@estorickcollection.com. The exhibition will travel to The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (7 May – 25 July 2004).
Suggested Reading:
Edwards, Paul, Blast: Vorticism 1914-1918, (2002).
Lewis, Wyndham, The Art of Being Rules, (1926); Time and Western Man, (1927); The Writer and the Absolute, (1952); The Revenge for Love, (1937); Self Condemned, (1954); The Childermass, (1928, rev. and continued as The Human Age, 1955-56); The Apes of God, (1930); Blasting and Bombarding, (1937); Rude Assignment, (1950).
Pound, Ezra, A Lume Spento, (1908); Personae, (1908); Exultation, (1908); Ripostes, (1912); Pisan Cantos, (1948).
Roberts, William, Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings, (Valencia, 1990).
