City View

Mediums: wood, paper, oil.
Location: The Tate Modern Gallery, London (the UK).

Like the composition “Open Window” of 1915, this engraving is from a series of those that the artist created in the style of Vorticism throughout the war. He worked in forms reduced to simple planes that show that the author wanted to create a more realistic, non-idealized vision of the modern world after the war. Although Wadsworth refused to follow in his father’s footsteps, he was attracted to the industrial North of England and once showed this area to Wyndham Lewis, in whose memoirs we read, “He (Wadsworth) stopped the car, and we looked into the blackened labyrinth of the city. He admired the view and said enthusiastically that “it looks like Hell.” This is exactly what the composition looks like when streets and shops with pipes sticking out of them are guessed. E. Pound, who owned some of the engravings of the master, compared them with the abstract language of music.