“The Vorticists” is a comprehensive overview of the paintings, sculpture, designs, and verbiage of Britain’s brief avant-garde flourish that began just before World War I and ended just after it. The Vorticists were strongly influenced by continental Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, but the movement deliberately distanced itself from all of them. They believed in the fallen angles of geometric abstraction and were inspired both by the frenzy of the modern, mechanized, dehumanized world epitomized by England and by primitive art. They were named Vorticists by a key member, the poet Ezra Pound, who had earlier described London as “a vortex of creativity.” Wyndham Lewis then justified the name at great length by curious excursions into the science of mechanics.
The Vorticists can reasonably be described as an Anglo-American group. In addition to Pound, they also half-embraced Sir Jacob Epstein, later Knight Commander of the British Empire and adorner of Britain’s cathedrals, born in New York’s Lower East Side. They were a quarrelsome and fissile group, with fellow travelers, the half-affiliated, and, of course, schismatics to be denounced (it was a movement with a manifesto). Like political manifestoes, artistic manifestoes tend to be muddled and declamatory. The Vorticists all wanted to blast away the staid, tedious remnants of Edwardian and Victorian England but could never agree on where to blast them to. Wyndham Lewis, a great egoist and self-publicist, claimed to be their leader, though this was disputed. In the copies of the Vorticists’ aptly-named journal, BLAST,on