Vorticist Composition («Cannon»)

Mediums: рencil, watercolour, paper.
Location: Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago (the USA).

The work is abstract only at first glance. Its second, unauthentic name – “The composition of the vortex with a figure” – helps to understand that this is figurative painting. The author depicted a very stylized figure of a man who can be identified as a woman if two parallels coming from the head are taken for long hair and if the protrusion below the shoulder girdle is taken for the chest. Responding to the term Vortex, coined by American writer E. Pound in 1913, the picture shows maximum energy. The power of movement is expressed in angular, diagonal shapes, which, the Vorticists created without renouncing the three-dimensionality of the image, unlike the lines and shapes of Italian Futurists and French Cubists.