1914 - 1920
Vorticism
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Vorticism
1914-1918 (1920)
Vorticism was a short movement of avant-garde art that appeared in the early twentieth century exclusively in England under the influence of Futurism and Cubism. It is represented by paintings and graphic works.
On July 2, 1914, in the first issue of BLAST magazine, the Vorticism manifesto was printed with a pink cover with the participation of David Bomberg, Lawrence Atkinson, Wyndham Lewis, Spencer Gore, Rebecca West and Ezra Pound. The editor was Wyndham Lewis. Ezra Pound was an ideological inspirer. He was the one who named the movement Vorticism in 1913. The magazine lasted two years but influenced British modernism.
English artist and art critic Roger Fry, who promoted post-impressionism, was at the origins of Vorticism. Later, it was influenced by Italian futurism in the person of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who lectured on the Italian avant-garde.
Mostly, artists used canvas, oil, pencil and paper. Genres of work were subject-themed, cityscape, landscape, figurative, portrait and still life.
Key ideas:
– Vorticism was an independent alternative to Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. This art movement refused the softness of the depicted objects, through geometricity tending to abstraction.
– Paintings of artists express their desire to capture the movement through sharp geometric lines, vortices and planes. Also, Vorticists used bright contrasting colours; there is no aerial perspective in their works – the far part of the composition is as saturated as the front one.
– Due to the brutal continuity of lines, zigzags and planes, subject-themed paintings are similar to abstractions.
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English painter William Roberts, revered for his large, complex and colourful compositions that he exhibited annually since the 1950s at the opening hours of the Royal Academy, was at the beginning of his career among the pioneers of the English art avant-garde. A member of Fry’s studio “Omega” and Vorticism group of Wyndham Lewis, Roberst positioned himself as a Cubist and for most of his very long creative career worked outside the mainstream.The artist, who had long served as the official military painter, was also elected a full member of the Royal Academy and awarded prizes. Roberts' works are not only in the collection of his London House Museum, but are also widely represented at the prestigious Tate Modern Gallery and other English and American museums and galleries.
1895 - 1980
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An English avant-garde artist, a graphic illustrator, closely associated with British Vorticism. Together with Jessica Dismorr, she formed the “female” part of a group of 11 artists who signed the Vorticist Manifesto. Helen Saunders published her artwork, as well as poetry and prose in BLAST magazine. As a representative of early British Abstractionism, she became one of the first authors in the country working in a style very close to non-figurative, and she reached certain heights in this, developing her style in the mainstream of ideas of Post-Impressionism and Vorticism.An important contribution of the artist to the social life of the country was her active support of the struggle to provide women with suffrage.The non-durable Vorticist movement, initially often seen as a “muscular” manly affair, was supported by two women in such an innovative and compelling manner that so far none of the retrospective exhibitions dedicated to this Anglo-American movement could be held without their paintings. One of the largest ones, “Vorticists: rebel artists in London and New York, 1914-1918” (2011), was exhibited not only in the United States and Great Britain but also in Italy.According to Helen Saunders, the movement represented "a very segmental group of artists, each of whom developed their ideas under the auspices of the vortex".
1885 - 1963
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An English avant-garde artist, an active participant in the non-durable but radical movement “Vorticism” that appeared in London just before the First World War.Edward Wadsworth not only signed the Manifesto of the new association, but also created graphic compositions for Blast magazine, working closely with its chief editor, Wyndham Lewis. Having placed the magazine “Explosion” in Wadsworth’s hand in his canvas “Vorticists in the restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring, 1915”, his colleague W. Roberts emphasized his significant role in the group. This was fundamentally important in the 1960s, when interest in the movement became more intense.The artist traveled a lot and contributed to the further development of the British avant-garde, introducing ideas of Surrealism into it. He was a member of such significant creative associations as the Paris group Abstraction-Création.
1889 - 1949
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Wyndham Lewis, the most famous English modernist, played a prominent role in both painting and literature. He is best known as the founder and the main representative of Vorticism, a specific branch of Futurism in the art that went far enough beyond its borders. Despite conventional methods, the idea of this English avant-garde movement is not to glorify the mechanization of society, but in its detrimental effect. The name of the work that derived from the Italian «vortizto» (whirlwind) is taken from the statement by W. Boccioni, an Italian Futurist, that all creativity comes from a whirlwind of feelings. Through the journals he published, Lewis influenced the development of the pioneering British movement as a whole.He mostly created portraits – he depicted key representatives of the culture of England in the first half of the 20th century, whom he knew personally. In the plot genre, the most powerful is his cycle of works on military subjects: the artist participated in the First World War.
1882 - 1957
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An English innovative artist, painter and graphic artist, a book illustrator. Jessica Dismorr was one of two women who became active members of the Vorticist movement and signed their Manifesto in 1914. Dismorr's fame is based on her status as an artist - a prominent representative of the early British avant-garde.Beginning as a Fauvist, Jessica worked a lot as a co-editor of the Blast magazine, which was aggressive towards Academism; in that magazine, she published her artwork, prose and poetry. Later, she created a recognizable form of geometric abstraction, which required not only talent, but also courage.Art historian H. Wilensky commented on her role as “the courage to overcome discrimination against female artists in England” and emphasized the importance of her work as “the most typical for artistic experiments of the time”. Due to the claims of W. Lewis (“this is what I personally did and said in a certain period”), it is not surprising that Dismorr was almost invisible in the history of modernism for quite a long time. However, a research conducted in the 1960s and an ongoing research, as well as major exhibitions, pay tribute to this artist and the second Vorticist, Helena Saunders.
1885 - 1939
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An English artist, one of the prominent figures of British avant-garde painting. A student of the famous Slade School, David Bomberg was one of the so-called “Whitechapel Boys”, artists from East London, many of who made important contributions to the visual arts of England. He was a member of the “London Group”, an association of artists of various modernist art movements. Bomberg exhibited his paintings at the New England Art Club and was a talented teacher, whose students were famous artists. The First World War, in which he was directly involved, had a profound effect on the artist's work, fundamentally changing his attitude to art. Despite the fact that the works of David Bomberg are considered the most vivid examples of the English avant-garde movement of Vorticism, he did not consider himself to be a representative this movement, always being independent in his creative style.
1890 - 1957