It is hard to define precise boundaries in art history. Perhaps the most dramatic case in point is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which the British art historian John Golding once described as the major turning point in Picasso’s career and the most important single pictorial document of the twentieth century. But the 1907 oil painting was not cubist. Georges Braque was first horrified by it until he realized what the cubist co-founder had incorporated: El Greco’s angular, elongated forms; Cézanne’s reduction of objects to their simplest forms (cones, cylinders, spheres); flattened perspectives from Greek vase paintings and Egyptian art; and emotionally charged elements of African sculpture.
Mainly through the triumvirate of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris, cubism was the forerunner of purism (Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Amédée Ozenfant), orphism (Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia), futurism (Filippo Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni), and vorticism, which, like its competitor futurism, dealt with the phenomena of machines and speed juxtaposed with the calm centre of the vortex. Blast, the official magazine of the vorticist movement, had but two issues, set in heavy type: the first in the summer of 1914, with a puce-coloured front, the second the following year with a black and white cover. Many of the works reproduced in the magazine have disappeared. So it is not surprising that vorticism is accorded a mere four-page entry in Concepts of Modern Art, the second-shortest essay in that authoritative book edited by Nikos Stangos.
What could be taken as a mere curiosity of English art during the First World War — or a short footnote in the history of world art — has now been stretched by the art historian and professor emeritus at McMaster University James King into a volume of expansive documentation that is informative in its brief analyses and potted biographies but only mildly persuasive. One problem is its structure: King’s definition of the aesthetic cause championed by his subjects comes almost halfway into “Our Little Gang”: The Lives of the Vorticists. Although its late appearance may suggest an inductive method, it certainly throws a wrench into his literary machine.
Wyndham Lewis’s Circus Scene, from 1914, with an energetic vortex around a calm centre.
Private Collection; Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust; Bridgeman Images
Divided into three main sections, framed by an introduction and an epilogue, King’s book does open with a trenchant close reading:
“We are getting our little gang together after five years of waiting,” Ezra Pound informed the poet William Carlos Williams in December 1913. The “little gang” to which he referred were the Vorticists, a group of like-minded visual artists of which he was not a member but the unofficial promoter. Pound’s use of the word “gang” suggests that he saw the Vorticists as a group of outsiders to the literary and artistic establishments. The word “gang” can also imply that the group might be capable of committing unlawful acts. And this is certainly how the group was sometimes seen by their contemporaries. “Of waiting” indicates that something had been delayed and had finally arrived.
At this point, it’s not clear what, exactly, was unlawful about the group. Since when does art have strict laws? The essential inference is that vorticism was controversially doctrinaire.
“Pound was the first person to apply the term ‘vortex’ to the ‘little gang,’ ” King continues. “By definition, the vortex is a whirlwind sucking in everything it encounters, whether animate or inanimate. As a metaphor, the word describes a world in chaos.” The Canadian-born British artist Wyndham Lewis used similar language to describe the movement he co-founded: “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there at that point is the Vorticist.”
Futurism was “accelerated Impressionism,” according to Pound, while vorticism extended such acceleration to create, as the critic Paul Overy put it, “an intense, inrushing perspective — a vortex.” It certainly magnified brutality in the sense of inhuman energy, especially in warfare and man’s violation of the environment, but hasn’t the world’s chaos always been a principal theme in literature and painting? Hasn’t every great painter striven to turn that chaos into work that contains some element of the representational? Pure abstraction is art with minimal feeling, and without feeling, art is inert. Francis Bacon’s screaming pope doesn’t utter words, but his contorted expression is distinctively representational and eloquent. As is Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Where is the vortex in Lewis’s Timon of Athens engravings from 1914? They do suggest a new visual language, and there is energy in the various shapes clashing with one another. However, as King acknowledges, the abstract designs are marked by an aesthetic confusion: “The conflict between two forms of representation in these illustrations may reflect Lewis’s indecisiveness as to whether abstraction or representation would best suit his art.”
Lewis was certainly the dominant vorticist — and not just because he was the best painter in the main group of seven (five men, two women). It was also because, as Concepts of Modern Art notes, “as a skilful polemicist he was his own best publicist.” Born in Nova Scotia in November 1882, to a wealthy though largely absent father, Lewis was brilliantly cerebral. At sixteen, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, at University College London, where his teachers recognized his talent while labelling him dangerously rebellious. In 1912, his Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair was included in Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. In charcoal and gouache, Lewis rendered a grimacing female whose facial contortion brings to mind German expressionism, though his straight lines in browns and oranges make it seem sculpted in wood. In Lewis’s version of Rubens’s Kermesse (1912), he used gouache, watercolour, pen, ink, and pencil to flatten figures with distorted limbs, monstrous faces, and forms that mix the robotic with the representational. One of Lewis’s visual sources was what King describes, with reference to early twentieth-century Parisian street culture, as “the combative, sadistic intertwining bodies of Apache dancers.” But Lewis’s programmatic theory was stronger than his art, and his group was never tightly knit.
As for his other flaws, Lewis was a flaming misogynist and a flagrant eraser of fellow artists whom he considered rivals to his political or doctrinal primacy. Although he benefited from the generous financial help of Kate Lechmere in founding the Rebel Art Centre, Lewis incarnated repellent chauvinism, influenced as he was by Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character, from 1903. He treated Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr (with whom he had conflicted relationships) as submissive, inferior associates, unworthy of being considered art rebels. He was competitive with Fry (who founded the Omega Workshops with members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1913), and he insulted David Bomberg by hiding his art in a major exhibition and deliberately failing to mention Vision of Ezekiel in the catalogue.
Bomberg (from a Jewish family of artisans) strikingly merged representation with abstraction in oils (The Mud Bath), charcoal (Sappers at Work), and Conté crayon (Family Bereavement). Two of his later pieces, Ju‑Jitsu and In the Hold, are brilliant oils where tight grids representing harshness, bewilderment, and fear somehow conspire with black shards to make fascinating compositions. But he remained on the margins of the vorticist movement. Moreover, as King shows, the testosterone-filled group had “power struggles, missed opportunities, violent encounters and heart-breaking mishaps.” William Roberts was strongly influenced by French cubism and the highly saturated colours of postimpressionists, so he was a reluctant vorticist. Edward Wadsworth supported Lewis, despite their aesthetic differences. Frederick Etchells showed a conflict between the representational and abstraction in his Hyde Park line cut. And the best of the lot, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, took true inspiration from Easter Island carvings.
Part 3, “Aftershocks,” may be the best section of King’s book, because it explores the group’s “post-Vorticist existences” as well as the continual tension between abstraction and illustration, between pure form and literal representation. Yet it is ironic that King’s epilogue is titled “The Last Supper,” taking as its reference Roberts’s The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring, 1914, an oil produced in 1962, decades after the movement had ended and in a dramatic style that, though vividly reminiscent of German expressionism, shows no vortex.
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay.
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