Vorticism: The Problematic British Art Movement

Many Vorticist artists and critics were associated with reactionary politics. The movement largely celebrated bellicose masculinity and physical violence, two factors that began to seem deeply unsettling to even its own members during and after the First World War. Historians examining Vorticism during its lifetime and in the following decades noticed how closely aligned the group was with certain iterations of Fascism. This was part of the “point” for many of the group’s members, who believed that war offered a clear path to cleansing Britain of its dull past.

Cover images of Lewis’s Blast magazine give us insight into some of the formal features the group privileged: blocky, hard edges and lines that shoot upward in violent diagonals. Human forms merge with brutal architecture and artillery, erasing any distinction between the organic and mechanical.

Edward Wadsworth’s later still lifes are crisp, with planes of flat color and meticulously rendered, sharp shapes. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sketches and drawings of human forms are distinctly robotic, distilled as they are into unsettling lines and unnatural angles. Brzeska’s drawings suggest that humans, animals, and machines might all be the same, with individuality pared down into efficient gestures.

Vorticism served for many of its practitioners as an occasion to band together to exhibit work. The group only held one formal show, in the summer of 1915, and Lewis’ Blast ceased printing in July of that year. The movement dissipated early into the First World War, after some members were killed in action, and others lost interest in the group’s values once they saw the actual impact of the war.

Even so, a number of artists, such as Wadsworth, continued to explore and celebrate Vorticist themes such as machines, industrialism, and modern innovation. Even after the formal breakup of the group, Wadsworth’s forms resemble gleaming metal and aluminum shavings; we can almost feel these shards threatening to slice our fingers.

In 2011, art historian Simon Watney accused Lewis of being self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, and a Fascist. Watney warns us against blindly celebrating the artist for his notoriety and creative activity: Lewis’ personal politics are inarguably disturbing and his legacy has largely overshadowed those of other members, such as Jessica Dismorr and Dorothy Shakespear (it seems more than coincidental that many of these marginalized figures were women, given Lewis’ own views about “effeminate weakness”).

Vorticism’s close associations with politics, which we now recognize as abhorrent and frightening, has helped relegate this movement to historical obscurity. This is a difficult movement to study, in part because Vorticism demands that we confront violent philosophies in a dispassionate way. Addressing Vorticism requires facing this troubling period of political history head-on, something that many historians have been reticent to do. Nevertheless, it is important that we continue to analyze the evolution and manifestation of radicalized ideas, in part so that we can be attuned to their development and ready to recognize them as they occur.