Blasting the Future!
'The Vorticist', wrote Wyndham Lewis in the first issue of the movement's magazine Blast (1914), 'does not suck up to Life.' Yet bravado scarcely fits the impression one gets from The VorticistTwo Vorticist Figures (1912) - another Lewis drawing that hangs next to The Vorticist - look ready to rule the world. Two post-apocalypse superhumans stand triumphantly amid a stylized backdrop, puffing out their muscular, mechanical chests to show dominion over all they behold. Indeed, they might demand that Life suck up to them.
A hundred years ago calling oneself avant-garde wasn't burdened by the careerist patina it has today, and the Vorticists, led by the polymath Lewis, played the role with gusto. Perhaps one of the shortest-lived influential movement in the history of art, Vorticism was a tornado of indignation that formed in London around 1911 and culminated in the founding of the Rebel Art Centre in early 1914 and the first publication of Blast later the same year. All this happened immediately after Futurism had reared its sleek head in Italy. Although the Vorticists clearly borrowed from the Futurist handbook, their manifesto, published in the first issue of Blast and signed by Lewis, Richard Aldington, Helen Saunders, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound and others, attempted to disociate the two movements by mocking Futurism's 'automobilism'. Besides, they reasoned, both the past and the future were escapes from the present and therefore 'sentimental'. Lewis was born on a ferry in the Bay of Fundy, a body of water on Canada's east coast famous for having the fastest tides in the world, an aptly unsteady beginning for someone who went on to become the leader of an evanescent group that used the image of a vortex to symbolize its dynamism. But Vorticism lost all momentum amid the quagmires of World War I, and the artist with perhaps the greatest potential in the group, Gaudier-Brzeska, died in battle in 1915, aged only 23.
'Blasting the Future!' was divided into three galleries that corresponded to the group's history: pre- or mid-war work in the first two rooms, and a third that was mostly post-1918. Energy and experimentation characterized the mood of the first room, which also hosted the best work in the show. Lewis's Vorticist drawings were here, alongside Ju-Jitsu (c. 1913), by David Bomberg (never a signed-up member of the gang), a painting that reflects the influence of the 'salon' Cubists such as Albert Gleizes and Robert Delaunay while also looking like something painted by a less fastidious Peter Davies. Gaudier-Brzeska's conté sketch Design for a Vorticist Ornament (1914) is a stunning abstract that mixes biomorphic forms with jagged edges and possesses the eye with its elegance. An earlier work by Gaudier-Brzeska, called Sketch of a Cabinet for the Omega Workshop (1913), hung in stark contrast beside the abstract ornament; this piece, with its stylized women cramped in the panels of the cabinet, is more decorative and smacks of Paul Gauguin and Art Nouveau.
Among war illustrations by William Roberts and Lewis in Gallery Two the highlights turned out to be paintings by Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr, the only two women in the group (the Vorticists apparently did not subscribe to Futurism's infamous misogyny). An image of a robotic, humanoid praying mantis seems to be hidden in Saunders' Vorticist Composition (c. 1915), but the pleasure is in the internal energy, the earthy ground that supports red and orange zips and diagonals, the blend of sharpness and subtlety, edginess and warmth. Dismorr's Abstract Composition (1915) brings a palpable group of shapes and surfaces into play, and the dull colours and exploration of surface and depth look surprisingly contemporary, even bringing to mind the work of a painter such as Tomma Abts.
In Gallery Three the slackening of the movement's attitude in the aftermath of the war was apparent in the variety of work - very little of it would be characterized, at first glance, as Vorticist. Edward Wadsworth adapted his techniques for the service of war, designing camouflage for the sides of ships that very cleverly fooled prowling submarines. But compare Ju-Jitsu, in the first gallery, with his soupy water-colour Two Nude Figures Dancing (1920). Although both paintings depict athletic figures, the change in style, from an exuberant mêlée of geometry and colour to translucent washes of suggestive, murky paint, shows how the war undermined the group's confidence in mechanical energy and hard forms.
A hundred years ago everyone wanted a piece of the future. These days we're not so sure. Lewis' Vorticist looks subjugated by his longing to be, at all costs, modern, whereas his Two Vorticist Figures are bursting with hubris; both positions now look old-fashioned. In 1954 Lewis published a book attacking the idea of progress in the arts, and perhaps irony was a motivating spirit of the Vorticists when they signed their manifesto. Which makes them the most contemporary of all Modernist movements - not avant-garde, exactly, but mock avant-garde.
