Feature: Exhibition - The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, at Tate Britain, Millbank, until September 4
Published: 23 June, 2011
by JOHN EVANS
Artistic movements come and go but what marks out the Vorticists – however widely defined and in this Tate Britain show it is very wide – is the timing and its subsequent resonance.
The works range from the sublime to the ordinary but what this is about is the resonance of modernism, machine forms, geometric imagery and war.
The term Vorticism was coined for the truly avant-garde movement by the poet Ezra Pound in early 1914 and based on an idea that all artistic endeavour must be born out of an emotional vortex.
The thrust was for change in opposition to Edwardian values and the group embraced not only the ideas of the philosopher TE Hume but its organ, Blast, of which there were just two issues, which included literary contributions from Pound,
TS Eliot and Rebecca West.
But its undisputed leader was the artist and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) who had formed the Rebel Art Centre in 1913 and was the editor of Blast, which arrived on the scene with a bright pink cover and radical typography which led one critic to comment that “The letter press… appears to be chiefly of an expletive and explosive order.”
Vorticism lasted for just about the war years. Its first 1915 exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture was presented at the Doré Gallery in London and featured the work of Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth.
But the influence of this “pivotal modernist group” was to be far wider and the exhibition features more than 100 works, including Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill and related studies; David Bomberg’s The Mud Bath and Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson’s Returning to the Trenches of 1916 and Marching Men lent by the Imperial War Museum. By 1916 Gaudier had been killed on the Western Front. As well as his sculptures there are poignant postcards he sent from the trenches which put the movement truly in its context.
Also included are the innovative “Vortographs” by Alvin Coburn including images of Pound, Epstein and others, which were first exhibited at the Camera Club in London in 1917.
The transatlantic influence of the group is emphasised. Indeed, the second exhibition was held in New York in 1917 on the eve of America’s entry into the war. But that show can be seen to have been so dominated by Wyndham Lewis’s work as to be almost a retrospective.
Controversially, shortly before he died, he wrote: “Vorticism, in fact, was what I personally did and said at a certain period.”
• The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, at Tate Britain, Millbank, until September 4, admission £12.70, concessions available, www.tate.org.uk /britain or call 020 7887 8888