Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915
(1961-62) by William Roberts.
Like other
self-conscious schools of twentieth century modernism, Vorticism was
imprecisely defined by its inventors, inevitably then producing work of
considerable variety. Though the concept
of the vortex had been first used by Ezra Pound to refer to some contemporary
art and poetry, suggesting the site of the greatest concentration of energy,
the idea of a Vorticist movement emerged publicly with Wyndham Lewis’s Blast
in 1915 and the show at the Doré Galleries in London the same year. [1] With an eye on being the most avant-garde of
the avant-gardes, Lewis had sought to distinguish himself from recognized
schools, maintaining the superiority of his own version of the geometric
designs of Cubism, encouraging abstraction energized by a certain modern
dynamic sometimes labeled “hard-edged,” resembling Futurism with an interest in
industry and violence. Lewis’s own art
and that of others who exhibited as Vorticists – the original show included
Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders,
Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth [2] -- combined Cubist fragmentation
of reality with imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. The idea of Vorticism itself adds little to
understanding of the works from that show or of Pound’s poetry of the
time. Lifting the banner of a militant
movement, however, l did provide an arena for avant-garde posturing by both Lewis
and Pound, entertaining in itself, but shedding limited light on their
art.
The investigation
into the question of to what extent, if any, these artists constituted a
coherent group would seem to depend primarily on their adherence to the
principles of Vorticism. As it happens,
the same year of the Vorticist exhibition, Lewis published a manifesto in his
journal Blast. [3] The reader
might be baffled to find virtually no reference to visual art in this document. Its attention-getting typography reinforces
the notion of volume implied by the publication’s title, but the shouting does
not seem to add up to much of a program.
The emphasis is rather on playing the bohemian viva voce,
satirizing the priggish and the sentimental, the conventional and the
bourgeois, while claiming for England (and in that way for himself) the
leadership of modern art. Lewis here constructs
a persona by taking center stage to enact the role of the modern artist.
There are
artistic references, all polemical, in the series of declarations opening the
inaugural and penultimate issue of Blast titled “Long
Live the Vortex!” Bearing the banner
of the avant-garde holds for Lewis a critical significance. Due to the value he places in novelty, he
declares that “education (art education and general education) tends to destroy
the creative instinct,” though his own theory remains obscure, apart from a
commitment “to destroy politeness, standardization, and academic, that is
civilized, vision” and to express “vivid and violent ideas.” He arbitrarily claims that “great artists in
England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist have
[sic] a strong traditional vein.”
Precisely what this might mean is unexpressed, except that Vorticist art
must engage “the Reality of the Present,” shaped by the artist acting as an
individual.
With a self-conscious
deprecation of realism, he maintains that Vorticism means to appeal to “every
class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” in spite of the fact that
he is well aware that the overwhelming majority of the populace will never hear
the word. He emphasizes this vague universality,
concluding with the summary statement: “Blast presents an art of individuals,” a
proposition acceptable to most Romantic and post-Romantic critics. In an equally ill-defined clue to the identity
of Vorticism, he anticipates Surrealism, saying “WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF
HUMANITY – their stupidity, animalism, and dreams.” [4]
Whatever this may mean, he fears that his
movement might be confused with Futurism which he repeatedly condemns as
“sensational and sentimental,” no advance at all, but merely “the latest form
of Impressionism.” His own predilections
for fascism made him no more sympathetic to Mussolini’s cheerleader. He ridicules the Italian’s interest in industrial
and mechanical imagery, saying “Marinetteism” [sic] amounts to nothing but “Automobilism.” His rivals, though somewhat similar to Lewis
to outsiders, are not to him even second-rate; they are contemptible
Lewis compensates
for the fact that Vorticism may seem to some a splinter of a faction by
jauntily speculating on the pillars of society becoming Vorticists: Lloyd
George, shortly to become prime minister, Lady Mond, Baroness Melchett, and
perhaps even the king. The effect of the
suggestion, of course, is to emphasize its unlikeliness and thus to highlight
Lewis’s counter-cultural credentials.
“Long Live the
Vortex!” is followed by a lengthy manifesto, or series of manifestoes. The first eighteen pages are a compilation of
blessings and curses of things English and French, an amusing and
typographically spectacular definition, I suppose, of Lewis’s specific
individuality. Much of this content is
satirical or otherwise humorous, though certain significant patterns
emerge. English wet weather and
politeness are both rather predictably condemned, but so are England’s
“socialist-playwright” and “tonks.”
Considering France he curses “gallic gush,” the Arc de Triomphe, and
France’s status as a “Mecca for Americans” and for many an “amative German
professor.” The years 1837 to 1900, the
period of “bourgeois Victorian vistas” are denounced as a whole, though he
blesses Britain’s “seafarers” expressing particular fondness for their
“restless machines.” Having blasted
“humour” in one section, he returns to bless it a few pages later. In England the “art-pimp” is blasted though
with no description by which he might be identified, while in France a similarly
mysterious “bad music” is condemned. The
reader is clearly dealing with a self-identified enfant terrible, more eager
to provoke than to present a new view of artistic practice. The address of Blast is, after all,
the Rebel Art Centre, implying that the most important element in Lewis’s
Vorticist program is rebellion.
A seven-part
document titled “Manifesto” follows.
Part I sheds little new light on artistic practice, but rather aims to
evoke and destroy dualities in the same pronouncements. This principle is restated in several
forms. The first item says “Beyond Action
and Reaction we would establish ourselves.”
Next, starting from “opposite statements of a chosen world,” the
Vorticist wishes to set up a “violent structure” between the extremes. Thus “we discharge ourselves on both
sides.” Etc. What this might mean in terms of practice or
connoisseurship remains obscure.
Perhaps in
illustration of this dialectic, Lewis proceeds, after establishing England’s
reputation as “anti-artistic,” to assert that this is the very reason “why
England produces such good artists.” Hints
of appropriate subject matter emerge as “the Art-instinct is permanently
primitive,” finding “stimulus” in a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc.,” a
“savage” wholly unlike any “Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited
imagination.” The modern artist will
derive material from “this enormous, jangling, journalistic fairy desert of
modern life” as artists of the past had been inspired by nature. In spite of the world’s being “a fairy
desert,” Lewis laments the passing of fairies and offers a somewhat premature
elegy for the Spanish bullfight.
Fruitful imaginative resources, “springs of creation,” remain, however,
characterized by “mysticism,” “gladiatorial instincts,” and “blood and
asceticism.”
Shakespeare
embodies a certain British “mysticism, madness, and delicacy” uniting comedy
and tragedy. Lewis indulges in his
peculiar version of chauvinism by claiming that the “Modern World” as a whole is
due to “Anglo-Saxon genius,” making the English the natural practitioners of
the imagery of “machinery, trains, steamships” “buildings, bridges, and
works.” They are “the inventors” of
modern “bareness and hardness,” and the enemies of “Romanticism,” while the
similar modernism of the Futurists is to him spurious, “romantic and
sentimental,” nothing but “gush.” The
tone of the journal is clear from the next feature, poetry from Ezra Pound,
beginning with his “Salutation the Third” which opens, “Let us deride the
smugness of ‘the Times’:/ GUFFAW!”
Apart from his
considerable brio in presenting an individualistic catalogue of preferences
somewhat resembling the lists of the hip and the non-hip Norman Mailer compiled
for the Village Voice and his generalized bad boy persona the reader may
yet wonder just what a Vorticist work of art looks like. The show at the Doré Gallery perforce answered
that question and, in Lewis’s “Note for Catalogue” [7] of the exhibition, he
let the cat peek just a bit out of the bag.
He opens with an adroit faux naïf use of passive voice,
referring to “painters, to whom the name Vorticist has been given” (as though
he and Pound had not concocted the movement).
He has not dropped his rivalry with Marinetti, referring to the “fuss
and hysterics of the Futurists,” but he is now at pains to distinguish himself
from another rival as well, Picasso in whose work he finds “passivity” (Lewis
used all capitals) in contrast to Vorticist “activity.” To him Picasso is a “dressmaker” who simply
“matches little bits of stuff he finds lying about. He puts no life into the
pieces of cloth or paper he sticks side by side, but rather contemplates their
beauty.”
The heart of
Lewis’s remarks in this introduction to the exhibition, however, stresses
abstraction rather than dynamism.
The impression received on a hot
afternoon on the quays of some port, made up of the smell of tar and fish, the
heat of the sun, the history of the place, cannot be conveyed by any imitation
of a corner of it. The influences weld themselves into an hallucination or
dream (which all the highest art has always been) with a mathematic of its own.
He criticizes naturalistic or academic painting the goal of
which is what was later called photorealism, concluding that abstraction is the
only adequate method of conveying his vision.
His whimsy has not altogether departed.
He suggests that if advertisements were abstract “the effect
architecturally would be much better, and the Public taste could thus be
educated in a popular way to appreciate the essentials of design better than
picture-galleries have ever done.” As a
final caprice, he implies that Vorticism is a contribution to the British war
effort in contending against German Kultur. In terms of actual Vorticist characteristics,
gallery-goers are offered only in fact abstraction as a kind of higher
symbolism and the idea of energy.
While Blast had
been primarily a counter-cultural entertainment, an irreverent eruption making
considerable noise while shedding little light, the exhibit allowed Lewis to
define the “movement” with bit more specificity. Today descriptions of Vorticist art generally
limit themselves to prescribing “hard-edged abstraction” allied on the one hand
with Cubist forms and on the other with Futurist themes.
The movement’s
other parent, however, was Ezra Pound whose primary concern was literary. Pound argues in his essay “Vortex” [8] for a
sort of abstraction in literature as well as visual art, quoting with approval
Pater’s line that “all arts approach the conditions of music.” He elaborates.
It is no more ridiculous that a
person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of
shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such
emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.
For him consciousness
is “the primary pigment,” and the artist is reproducing a state of mind, not an
observed external scene. Just as poetry
tends toward the pleasures of music, music answers and, to him, “music, sheer
melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.” Everything is symbolic. “The vorticist relies not upon similarity or
analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.”
Realism is a “secondary application”
In Pound’s
Vorticist poetry prettiness, too, is not the focus.
Since the beginning of bad writing,
writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does
not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the
word beyond formulated language.
In accordance with Pound’s admiration for craft, the primary
aim for him is formal, a value highlighted by his claim (which he immediately
moderates) that “Lewis is Bach.”
Music was vorticist in the
Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and
description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the
mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a
fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.
Far from dropping
Imagisme for Vorticism, he built on its foundation. Far from being left behind, the image
generates the vortex. For him “THE IMAGE
IS NOT an idea,” and presumably not mere decoration either. He characterizes it
using formal terms, beginning with the word vortex itself. To Pound the vortex is “a radiant node or
cluster.” His images are meant neither
to be symbols requiring decoding nor decorative elements, but rather vortices,
formal patterns “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are
constantly rushing.” Even the sort of
images he admired in East Asian poetry become, through this lens, vorticist
nodes of activity in spite of their apparent stillness. Rhythms alone are, like music, capable of
communicating anything. “I believe that
every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some
rhythm-phrase to express it.”
Physicists in the
early twentieth century found, upon close examination of material reality, that
its apparent solidity conceals teeming activity and extraordinary potential
energy on the subatomic level. At the
time of Vorticism scientists were beginning to dig deeper yet, uncovering first
the mysteries of relativity and then those of quantum mechanics. By analogy the Vorticist claimed to be
likewise looking into the very essence of things.
Pound, then,
argues for the formal values of abstraction while maintaining a practice of
imagism, asserting what to him are
essentially artistic values against thematics.
He republishes his principles of Imagism which have now become
principles of Vorticism as well. [9] He aspires to pass beyond the mild beauty
of the picturesque, beyond the appeal of the concrete specific, to reach a
glimpse of the tumultuous, sometimes awe-inspiring energy of the vortex. He repeats at the same time Lewis’s
conviction that Vorticism must be altogether au courant, in the very forefront
of innovation. “Vortex is the present,
the moment of the creation of the future.”
To visualize
Vorticism as the central modern art movement he situates it among others,
Marinetti, Picasso, and Kandinsky in particular. He declares defiantly that Marinetti “did not
set on the egg that hatched me,” he disparages Marinetti’s Futurism as merely
“a sort of accelerated
impressionism.” For him all non-Vorticist
work, “every work that is not poised in this whirlpool” [i.e., the vortex) “is
a corpse”.
On the other hand
he admires the artists most associated with abstraction and Cubism, Kandinsky
and Picasso, and is willing to accept descent in their lineage. “Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother,
classicism and romanticism of the of the [Vorticist] movement.” In associating Picasso with a sort of
“classicism,” he may have been recognizing the tendency toward poised serenity
in composition of many of Picasso’s Cubist work during the World War I period
even before what art historians often label his ”classical” phase.
To Kandinsky he
attributed the principle that content is quite irrelevant. “An artist should have just as much pleasure
in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting
portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists
bid us.” This insistence on abstraction
is shared by Lewis and Pound and is perhaps the chief discernable principle of
Vorticism.
The documents
here analyzed preserve the idea of the movement, though Lewis’s visual works
might well be subsumed under other labels.
Vorticism is ever elusive since it “never presented a coherent point of
view.” [11] A critical article wonders
“on what basis we can call any work of art ‘Vorticist,’” adding “It is difficult to imagine any sentence as
an example of the Vorticist style, or any visual style in painting.” A description of Vorticist work might be
equally applied to paintings by Kandinsky or Picasso or, indeed, to “most of
the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.” Vorticist poetry seems to be in an even
worse case. Even when looking at Pound’s
own work, the Vorticist character “remains elusive.” [10] another investigator says that, in general,
Vorticism “failed miserably,” and “left no permanent traces on Western styles of art.” “If few understood it then,” the writer
concludes, “it is even more obscure now.” [12]
Vorticism, though
occasioned perhaps more by Lewis’s break with Roger Fry’s Omega group and
Pound’s rambunctious free-lance troublemaking than by theoretical
considerations, enjoyed a brief efflorescence.
At its crest, though, the movement had little to distinguish it from the
longer-lived trends of Imagism and Cubism.
Vorticism’s founders, much as they looked down upon Marinetti, shared
with him a noxious politics that has discouraged discipleship. Yet for a time Vorticism seized the spotlight
of the art world, though this most often meant attracting scorn. The Daily Mail commented that “Almost
any child between the ages of eight months and three years can be a first rate
Vorticist if it is given some lightly coloured paints, bottle of blacking and
mama’s new white tablecloth.” [13] Such
philistinism is by no means entailed by a critique of Vorticism. Lewis’s pictures and Pound’s poems retain a
lasting value and Blast will remain a marvel, a pyrotechnic display that
energizes and amuses still after more than a hundred years, a reminder of a
time when the Bohemian avant-garde still possessed the power to shock and, with
that sometimes, to stimulate thinking.
1. This was followed by a New York show at the Penguin Club the same year1915. The group then lost coherence, though elements recoalesced as Group X (which exhibited in 1920). Since then, major shows focusing on Vorticism as a historic phenomenon, first at the Tate in 1956, and since at the Estorick Collection in 2004, and again at the Tate in 2011.
2. Others of the
circle included Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Sir Jacob Epstein.
3. Though the
manifesto bears eleven signatures, it is thought to have been written by Lewis.
4. Capitals in the
original. Following this statement,
however, Lewis’s capitalization seems impressionistic and improvisatory, guided
by design more than content. To avoid an
unpleasantly busy page, I shall silently return other cited phrases to
conventional capitalization.
5. Reprinted in Advertisements
for Myself, p. 364-6 where the reader learns that “Schrodinger’s model of
the atom,” “differential calculus,” and Catholic things are hip, while “Bohr’s model of the atom,” “analytic
geometry,” and what is Protestant are square.
6. Whether another
critic might deem “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” passive may seem dubious, though
many of the artists’ Cubist works are serenely composed and he was shortly to
enter what art historians call his neo-classical period.
7. Available online
at https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/724.
8. “Vorticism,” The Fortnightly Review, September
1914. Available at
https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.
9. “A Few Don’ts by
an Imagist,” Poetry Magazine,z March 1913.
10. William C. Lipke
and Bernard W. Rozran, “Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast,” Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966).
11. Arthur J.
Sabatini, “Vorticism Revitalized,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.
38, No. 4 (Summer 2015).
12. Herbert N.
Schneidau, “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.” Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 3
(Feb., 1968).
13. Quoted in Andrew Thacker “Blasting Beyond Britain,” Fortnightly
Review, August 24, 2011.
