Blast: Vorticism 1914-1918 (review)

Vorticism was a British-born art-and-literary movement founded in 1913 by P. Wyndham Lewis, a painter, novelist and critic, whose parents were British and American, and the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound. The name was coined by the latter, from the word "vortex," meaning an influence so compelling that everything within range is sucked into it. In part, it was inspired by Italian Futurism (which was preoccupied with the machine-age movement), so that most people commonly think of it now, too simplistically, as a composite of that and Cubism. As every cause has its manifesto, Vorticism's was a short-lived magazine called BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex, which was first issued on 15 July 1914. In that issue, which is as much remembered for its typography as for its text, various things are "blasted" (hence the magazine's name), while others are "blessed." Humor, for example, is blasted as "Quack ENGLISH drug for stupidity and sleepiness. Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalizing like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious chemistry of laughter"; yet, in the same issue, it is also later blessed as "the great barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the ancient Fair of LIFE." Originally published in German in 1996 as an exhibition catalog by two German museums, this book is a collection of essays by six of the subject's leading experts (including Richard Cork, whose books are well known), illustrated by 100 reproductions (40 of which are in color) of paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture by its various practitioners, among them Lewis himself, Edward Wadsworth (who contributed to WWI ship camouflage), David Bomberg, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Supplemented by biographical notes and a substantial bibliography, it offers a lucid yet solid account of a maverick branch of Modernism.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Fall 2001.)