Artistic rebellion

Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known.

Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. However, the Tate’s show has already been seen in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, making it the first ever Vorticist exhibition in Italy, stronghold of Futurism (Vorticism’s rival), and in America, at the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina. Vorticism was last shown in the USA in 1917, so this exhibition is making history in a number of ways. I saw it first in Venice, where it looked compact and dynamic in the small white rooms of the Guggenheim. In London it is more spread out, and the effect is correspondingly diffuse.

The movement was short-lived, operating on the brink of war, 1914–15, involved fundamentally with abstraction and the machine ethos, and reacting against the Edwardian status quo by importing the discoveries of European avant-garde art. Radical, combative and energising, it was driven largely by two powerful personalities: Ezra Pound, who named it, and Wyndham Lewis who as the self-styled Enemy was in a state of prolonged artistic rebellion against almost everything. He was joined by the brilliant young French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and by such allies as Jacob Epstein, William Roberts, Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells and the fauvist painter Jessica Dismorr. Apart from a series of memorable sculptures, Vorticist work tends to be small in scale and consist of gouaches or ink drawings done on paper.