Vorticism

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a key figure of the English modernist movement in both art and literature, acquainted with - as friend or enemy - almost all the key figures of British culture in the first half of the 20th century. Best known from 1914 as the founder and leading proponent of the pioneering British modernist movement Vorticism, his considerable legacy in another field, portraiture, was the subject of a retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG).

Did Vorticism, that little-known British avant-garde movement that existed so briefly in the second decade of the 20th century, really deserve the major exhibition “The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World” (June 14 to September 4) at London’s Tate Britain? Despite being Britain’s first truly radical artistic movement, it was, after all, held in such little regard after the World War I that it was all but forgotten for decades until the early 1950s. That was when the English art critic Herbert Read published his seminal survey “Contemporary British Art”, a book that championed the radicalism of British art. It was a publication that also gave the impetus for the Tate Gallery’s 1956 exhibition “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism”, placing the difficult and irascible Lewis at the helm of the movement - as Read had done - and exciting some interest in avant-garde circles.