the most important documents in the history of modernism. They rhetorically and typographically embody the violent iconoclasm of vorticism, an avant-garde movement in the literary and visual arts centered in London. The English writer and painter Wyndham Lewis founded and edited Blast, whose title he said, 'means the blowing
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away of dead ideas and worn-out notions' (it also suggests ^ire, explosion, and damn!). He drafted much of the vorticist manifesto and fashioned its shocking visual design, likening Blast to a 'battering ram.' Ezra Pound became a vorticist after abandoning imagism, because he felt that the vortex, 'the point of maximum energy,' offered a more dynamic model for art than the static image of the imagists. The French sculptor Henri Gaudier- Brzeska (1891?1915), killed in World War I and memorialized both in the 'War Number' of Blast and in Pound's book named for him, was another key vorticist leader. In the pages of Blast 1 and 2, artworks by Lewis, Gaudier- Brzeska, and other visual artists appeared alongside writings by Lewis, Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other avant- gardists.
The vorticist manifesto, signed by Lewis, Pound, and Gaudier-Brzeska, among others, reflects the London modernists' competitive anxiety about European avant-gardes such as cubism and especially futurism. Under the charismatic leadership of F. T. Marinetti, the futurists celebrated speed, modernization, and the machine, while calling for the destruction of the museums, the libraries, all such bastions of the past. The vorticists?in lists of things and people to 'BLAST' and 'BLESS' compiled at group meetings?similarly blast convention, standardization, the middle class, even the 'years 183 7 to 1900. ' And yet despite their cosmopolitan enthusiasms, the vorticists also assert their independence, repeatedly criticizing the futurists. For all their antipathy toward England, they also 'BLESS' it, revaluing, for example, English mobility (via the sea) and inventiveness (as the engine of the Industrial Bevolution).
Wyndham Lewis (1882?1957) studied for several years at London's Slade School of Art before exploring the avant-garde visual arts in Paris. On returning to London in 1909, he began to write fiction and exhibit his paintings. During World War I he served as an artillery officer and then as a war artist, and afterward he continued to paint and publish essays, poetry, and fiction, including his first novel, Tarr (1918). Like Ezra Pound, he alienated many friends because of his subsequent support of fascism.
The excerpts below are taken from Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, No. 1 (1914). For the complete two-part Blast manifesto and more on futurism and cubism, see 'Modernist Experiment' at Norton Literature Online.
Long Live the Vortex!
Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!1
We stand for the Reality of the Present?not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant2 Past
We want to leave Nature and Men alone.
We do not want to make people wear Futurist Patches, or fuss men to take to pink and sky-blue trousers.3
l. London and dynamism of the modern age and sought to 2. Boastful of valor. break with the past and traditional forms. 3. The futurists celebrated the technology, power,
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We are not their wives or tailors.
The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously.
WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY?their stupidity, animalism and dreams.
We believe in no perfectibility except our own.
Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content.
We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism),4 and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art.
WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it's crude energy flowing through us.
It may be said that great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really great artist had a strong traditional vein.
Blast sets out to be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no other way.
Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody.
The Man in the Street and the Gentleman are equally ignored.
Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of the individuals.
Education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct. Therefore it is in times when education has been non-existant that art chiefly flourished.
But it is nothing to do with 'the People.'
It is a mere accident that that is the most favourable time for the individual to appear.
To make the rich of the community shed their education skin, to destroy politeness, standardization and academic, that is civilized, vision, is the task we have set ourselves.
We want to make in England not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals, wherever found.
