Collection: Vorticism

Vorticism was the short lived British avant garde movement that Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) founded in London in 1914. Ezra Pound coined the name, taking the figure of the vortex from his earlier poetic theory. The movement combined Cubist faceting with Futurist concerns for energy and dynamism, while sharpening both into a harder edged geometric clarity grounded in mechanical and industrial subject matter. Lewis defined Vorticist painting as activity opposed to the tasteful passivity of Picasso.

The group's principal organ was the journal BLAST, of which two issues appeared, in June 1914 and July 1915. The participants included Lewis, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949), David Bomberg (1890–1957), William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Lawrence Atkinson, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. The single Vorticist exhibition opened at the Doré Galleries in London on 10 June 1915 with forty-nine works. The First World War effectively ended the movement: Gaudier-Brzeska was killed at Neuville-Saint-Vaast in June 1915, and most of the surviving members enlisted within the year.