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| 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.
