Vertiginous Vortex: Out Little Gang / The Lives of the Vorticists

Reaktion Books/Univeristy of Chicago Press

“Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said, during a certain period.” 

Wyndham Lewis

“Vorticism . . . what does this word mean? I do not know.”

Wyndham Lewis

Even art historians with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of advanced visual art trends such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism are often somewhat at a loss to grasp, let alone to cogently explain, the obscure art and literary movement that arose in the second decade of the 20th century in English avant-garde circles known as Vorticism, mostly by the Vorticists themselves. After the opening salvo of radical thinking that exploded in the new years of that newest of all new centuries, with a shared intellectual bomb contained in both Sigmund Freud’s 1899 theories of the unconscious, and Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory, tradition was turned on its head. Among other recent discoveries that seemed to call into question the sanctity of classical values, the domains of art and literature were also about to begin actively reflecting the dominant prevailing mindset of drastic and hyper-accelerated change.

The audacious remark quoted above from the singularly confident painter/writer Wyndham Lewis is ameliorated somewhat by his second equally audacious observation. But the first is accurate to a large extent, considering that Vorticism, as chronicled so fully by James King on his splendid new history of the movement and its members from Reaktion Books, Our Little Gang: The Lives of the Vorticists, was really an idea concocted in the feverishly modernist heads of Lewis and his poet friend Ezra Pound. Pound is, in fact, as the chief proponent of another ism, Imagism, the rogue who first described an apparently gestating movement of their fellow friends, painters and writers as a stylistic vortex. His adage, or near command, to “make it new!” pretty much summed up both appetite of the new century for a new way of thinking, seeing and being. This ism, that ism, prism-ism.

Ezra Pound, 1913. (Photo: Mina Loy.)

And Vorticism, wedged as it was somewhat awkwardly in between the more famous trends of Cubism, extolled by Picasso and Braque and Futurism, embodied by Marinetti and Boccioni (mostly because those movements were French and Italian), would deliver the main menu of experimental dishes to sate that appetite. King quite rightly situates its commencement with the infamous Post-Impressionist exhibition in November 1910 at London’s Grafton Galleries. The “new spirit” was born largely in response to that show. Though never officially a member of the Vorticists, Pound was nonetheless their chief spokesperson and publicist, with Lewis performing a kind of advocate and missionary role in tandem. I first encountered the titanic Wyndham Lewis when I was younger, so much younger than today, and worked with a colleague in the warehouse of a notable publisher. This chum was doing his Master’s thesis on Lewis at that time and our coffee-break chats intrigued me into a lifelong fascination with the irascible monk of modernism. Since then I have developed something of a fetish for the writings and paintings, plays and poems of Vorticism’s chief sales representative (in spite of all his serious personal flaws).

Wyndham Lewis, 1913. (Photo: Mina Loy.)

King’s book explores this heady mix of egos and ideas thoroughly, providing us with a crucial biography of both the individual members and a collective biography of their times and collective endeavours. As an official movement, despite its flight beneath the radar of most cultural historians, and perhaps owing to the brevity of its truncated lifespan (roughly 1911-1914), it was substantially a reflection of two things: the personal, social and professional milieux of about dozen avant-garde English artists and writers based in London in what Lewis called “a little narrow segment of time, on the far side of World War I”; and in the larger cultural context, as a mirror, maybe even a magnifying glass, revealing how politics, social interactions and the arts in general unearthed a radical affront to traditional values of aesthetics and classical notions of beauty. As such, the book is a most welcome companion volume to the 1972 William Wees study of the English avant-garde, the tome I first encountered at the outset of my Lewis fetish all those years ago.

Composition, Wyndham Lewis, 1913. (Tate Gallery, London.)

Like Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and so many other isms, any radical movements, especially one that also devised a Rebel Art Centre to compete with the staid bourgeois museum sites so beloved by conservatives, Vorticism also had a manifesto. (After all, what’s any movement without a manifesto?) So Lewis was eager to deliver one. And as King amply illustrates in his saga, by far the most accurate event in space and time to appreciate the aims of the Vorticist Group would be the dramatic publication of Blast. The magazine’s broadsheet, with its experimental meandering typefaces and sizes, was, apart from the paintings, sculptures and books by the members themselves, in itself a grandiose contribution to art history. Lewis wanted it to be a radical visual assault on mores, and it was that for sure, a visual artwork in its own gaudy right which Pound described as a great magenta-covered opusculus. Its first issue arrived only weeks before the outbreak of World War I, followed by a second, the War Issue, in 1915.

In this blatantly experimental limited edition print salvo for the entire Vorticist Group ethos, Lewis and Pound, one via his design and the other via his poetry, vividly demonstrated the core essence of their movement. It was an example of what one observer, the British-based culture writer Gavin Burrows, identified as "lucid frenzy" in his article “The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World.” (In fact, he liked their vertiginous vibe so much he even named his own blog after it.) Few aesthetic terms better encapsulate their disdain for tradition and their vertiginous rebellion against the haughty stuffiness of critics they deplored, such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The very multi-media format of the movement, encompassing painting, poetry, design, craft, sculpture, literature and typography all at once, was vastly ahead of its time. Only the horror of industrialized war would rapidly dampen their enthusiasm for the age of the machine which they so glorified. In light, or darkness, of war’s machinations, both Jacob Epstein and Gaudier-Brzseska would soon reject machine mentality in their work, and the latter was a fatality on the battlefield shortly before the second issue of Blast.

Blast, Issues #1 and #2, 1915.

King not only picks up the vibrating ball of Vorticist behaviour and carries it forward upfield into our present postmodern era (one that, I think, owes a considerable debt to the dissonant discontinuity of these early provocateurs) but also re-interprets what made their attitudes integral to the overall revaluation of all values that recurs with startling regularity every couple of generations. The phrase “our little gang” he uses as his curious primary title prior to designating his work as a kind of communal biography, was first used by Pound in a letter to the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams: “We’re getting our little gang together.” King expresses a certain fondness for Pound’s manner of speaking: “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.” And unapologetic abstraction was that unlawful act.

Indeed, it sometimes seems in retrospect that the entire raison d’être of the gang was, just as it had been for the Cubists and Futurists, to launch an all-out assault on accepted codes of artistic and literary craftsmanship. By definition, King stipulates, “a vortex is a whirlwind sucking in everything it encounters, whether animate or inanimate.” That might be why Pound’s stalwart cohort Lewis called their joint venture “art as a battering ram,” but it’s also why he found the vortex metaphor useful in describing a world in chaos, as the period leading up the first global conflict certainly was, teetering on the edge of a massive calamity: “At the heart of the vortex is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there at that point is the Vorticist.” He and Pound, as well as such talented rebels as Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, David Bomberg (my personal favourite of the Vorticist painters), Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr and the entire creatively inspired crew of the famed Omega Workshops were therefore, at least in their minds, positioned on the narrow border between order and chaos.

Mud Bath, David Bomberg, 1914. (Tate Gallery, London.)

Where is that constantly shifting borderline? This is one of the questions which King’s book addresses so effectively, especially by examining the stresses and conflict between the often monumental personalities of these artists and authors. For example: 

Vorticism is not a single style, although these artists often riff on each other’s works, but there are moments when their works were very similar. Despite its short existence, it has much to tell us about how England proved to be a hostile environment. It is also a moment that was stifled by war; in a very real way it simply ran out of time. I emphasize how relations within the group influenced the making of their art. Roberts and Bomberg were resistant to being labeled Vorticists. Lewis and Bomberg despised each other. Dismorr and Saunders quietly bided their time in a testosterone-filled environment.  

Luckily, the distaff side would come into its own later on.

There is even a rewarding and appealing kind of aspect to the near-soap opera quality of the various internecine liaisons and private love affairs or feuds, an element that humanizes these often mythic-scaled characters as we are guided on a personal tour in Part One of the early lives of the original seven founders, especially their nascent artistic sensibilities. Part Two brings us further along as the original seven are thrown in the intense vortex of their own infamous creation. Part Three focuses on their post-Vorticist lives, and how they managed to simply get on with it independently after the barbaric interruption of the war: “Their lives were filled with power struggles, missed opportunities, violent encounters and heart-breaking mishaps.” Most satisfying is King’s recreation of their personalities in conflict and creation, of course; but also, and maybe even more importantly, his close attention to their artworks themselves and their public exhibition history. King also reminds us that at heart their story is about daring young artists striving passionately to make the world a better place. And they actually did, for a short time.

Fish, Henri-Gaudier Brzeska, 1914. (Tate Gallery, London.)

From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, the period that Our Little Gang oversees, a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing both time and space. Technological developments and innovations such as the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane established the material foundation for all this re-orientation. Some developments appeared to shape even our consciousness itself directly. King is forever focusing our gaze on what matters most, looking back at their efforts to free themselves from the constraints of the stodgy artistic past and to make vibrant abstract work that occupied a future they sincerely wanted to build. We can still marvel at the sheer romantic scope of their heartfelt intention to live out a palpable utopian dream.

To the Vorticists, and to probably all the other ists, it must have felt as if, subsequent to 1910 and then certainly once the war that didn’t end all war soon arrived, everything had been swept away by a tidal wave of change, and the so-called new spirit in the arts was an indicator of that tsunami. The fact that their attitude may not have been realistic doesn’t mean what they felt wasn’t real. No matter how far we move away from that last century, it will always be a special one, a period during which we all collectively, whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew it or not, were captivated and entranced by what I like to call art of the recent future: art, that is, which is so radically new that it remains permanently futuristic. In fact, precisely because it was so utopian, the Vorticist future is literally still arriving every day. James King’s fine new book is a mesmerizing memo from that future.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.