Since the millennium, the only creditable survey of twentieth-century British art was at a museum in Germany (typical Germans, always getting their beach towels down first). That 2003 exhibition was titled ‘Blast to Freeze’ after the two explosive movements – vorticism and Young British Art – that bookended our boisterous hundred-year war between modern art, the viewing public and the artists themselves.
Being typical Brits, of course, both groups burnt brightly before hitting self-destruct and apologising profusely in case they’d offended anyone. Modesty also prevents history from acknowledging any true innovation in either camp, with the Vorticists being pre-empted by Italian futurism and the Brit artists beaten to the punch by Duchamp, Koons and New York in general.
However, Tate’s current show – which, incidentally, has already travelled in the opposite direction to these influences, stopping first in America and then in Italy – doesn’t dwell on the shortcomings of the former and more radical of those two crucial moments (which lasted only five brief years from 1914-1919). So let’s buck our Englishness for a minute and join in the celebrations for vorticism, which was itself nothing if not an anachronistic amalgamation of international immigrants and their often autonomous ideas.
The ostensible leader of the vorticists, the irascible Wyndham Lewis (born in Nova Scotia), had already fallen out with everyone from the boho Bloomsbury set in London to the leader of the artistic force that he was closest in spirit to: the futurists’ founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. But even if the artistic vortex was born of rejection, necessity and antipathy, it was sufficiently ferocious in nature and discordant in culture to cause more than just a stir, if not quite a full-blown tornado.
Jacob Epstein’s stormtrooper astride his ‘Rock Drill’ comes immediately to mind and takes pride of place here at the entrance. While anticipating vorticism by a year or so, the robot-solider does share the discombobulated arms and mechanized face of Lewis’s astonishing self-penned suite of prints, also of 1913, suggesting there was indeed some energetic zeitgeist sucking these artists inexorably together.
Yet much of the work produced under the vorticist banner was far less bombastic and not all of its exponents went in for dervish-like depiction. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (recently arrived from Paris) may have entertained similarly anarchistic tendencies to the pre-eminent vorticist poet, Ezra Pound, but his sculptures drew as much from ancient totems as from modern-day machinery. On the other hand, despite being arguably the movement’s greatest painter, David Bomberg never officially signed on the vorticist’s dotted line. Unfortunately, by sticking to the letter of who and what exhibited in the two accepted shows of the time (one in London and one in New York), Tate’s curators have stymied the movement’s reach and blunted some of its sharpest weaponry.
In truth, vorticism was as unfocused as its scattershot ‘Blast’ manifesto – attacking everything in sight – and it’s with no little irony that the movement was truncated by the very sort of violent struggle, in World War I, that their work seemed to predict. What should be gleaned from this show, apart from how Tate’s unerring even-handedness can occasionally dull even the most exciting prospect, is that the continentals don’t always do it better than us (albeit longer and more stylishly, perhaps). Vorticism was angrier than cubism, less flickery than futurism and full of less macho surprises, like the three female members who all shine with the benefit of hindsight.