Fisun Güner

INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA

Fisun Güner
Visions of Urban Apocalypse

№3 2011 (32)

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 move¬ment, 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 pub¬lished his seminal survey "Contemporary British Art", a book that championed the radicalism of British art. It was a publica¬tion that also gave the impetus for the Tate Gallery's 1956 exhi¬bition "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.