Vorticism (pronounced vawr-tuh-siz-uhm)
A short-lived movement in the British avant-garde, nurtured
by Wyndham Lewis, which climaxed in a London exhibition in 1915 before
being absorbed.
1914: The construct was vortic + -ism. The Latin vortic
was the stem of vortex, (genitive vorticis), an archaic from of vertex (an eddy of water, wind, or
flame; whirlpool; whirlwind whirl, top, crown, peak, summit), from vertō (to turn around, turn about) from
vertere (to turn), from the primitive Indo-European wer (to turn; bend). The –ism suffix is from the Ancient Greek
ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly,
sometimes through the Latin –ismus &
isma (from where English picked up
ize) and sometimes through the French –isme
or the German –ismus, all
ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express
a finished act or thing done). It
appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of
action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as
a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice,
state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion
or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism;
witticism etc). The derived noun and adjective was vorticist; the
adjective vorticistic, even at the time, was rare and there seems to have been
no use of vortical.
The name Vorticism
was said to have been coined in 1914 by the poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) years
before fascism and madness entered his soul.
Pound had already used the word vortex to describe the effect modernist
poetry was having on intellectual thought in Europe and he used the word not in
the somewhat vague sense it often assumed when used figuratively to suggest swirling
turbulence but rather as a mathematician or meteorologist might: an energy
which gathers from the surrounding chaos what’s around, imparts to it a geometrical
form which, intensifying as it goes, arrives at a single point. Pound’s coining of the name is generally
accepted but some historians claim the name was chosen by the Italian futurist
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) who claimed all creative art could emanate only from
a vortex of emotions.
Vorticism flourished only briefly between 1912-1915 as an overly aggressive reaction to what was held to be an excessive attachment to and
veneration for delicacy and beauty in art and literature, preferring to
celebrate the tools of modernity, the violence and energy of machines. In painting and sculpture the angles were
sharp and the lines bold, colors displayed in juxtaposition to emphasize the starkness of their difference and there was a reverence for
geometric form and repetition. The
movement in 1914 published its own magazine:
Blast: the Review of the Great English
Vortex which was more manifesto than critique, a London-based attempt to gather together the artists and writers of the avant‐garde
in one coherent movement. It wanted the shock of the new.
The idea was an art
which reflected the strains of the vortices of a modern life in what was increasingly a machine age. Thus, although
it remains a footnote in the history of modern art, the label Vorticism refers to
a political and sociological point rather than a distinct style such as contemporaries like Cubism or Futurism. The timing was of course
unfortunate and the outbreak of war in 1914 robbed Vorticism of much or its
initial energy; the exhibition eventually staged in London’s Doré
Gallery in 1915 remained a one-off and, like much of the pre-1914 world,
Vorticism didn’t survive the Great War.
Being unappreciated at the time, most of the paintings of the vorticists
were lost but retrospectives have been assembled from what remains and the
still extant photographic record and there’s now a better understanding of the
legacy and the influence on art deco, dada, surrealism, pop art, indeed, just
about any abstract form. Graphic art too
benefited from the techniques, the sense of line and color identifiable in
agitprop, twentieth century advertising and, most practically, the “dazzle” camouflage
used by admiralties in both world wars as a form of disguise for ships.
Ezra Pound (1919) by Wyndham Lewis 1919.
