‘OUR LITTLE GANG’ : THE LIVES OF THE VORTICISTS

By James King

Reaktion Books. 230 pages. £30. ISBN 978-1-83639-055-8

Reviewed by Jim Burns

James King, in his introduction to this welcome book, refers to the Vorticists as a “group of like-minded visual artists”, with Percy Wyndham Lewis as what might be called their leading light, and Ezra Pound as their “unofficial promoter”. What kind of “visual artists” were they? King says that “in its brief existence from 1913 to 1915, Vorticism was the first attempt by English artists to practice a form of abstraction that was distinct from all the other manifestations on the Continent”.

But what was that “form” and why was it distinctive? Here’s one description :  it “combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment”. However, King says : “Vorticism may be a form of Cubism, but Vorticism experimented even more boldly with colour, employed more angular shapes and distorted spatial perception more dramatically”. As for the philosophical aspect, King observes, “By definition, the vortex is a whirlwind, sucking in everything it encounters, whether animate or inanimate. As a metaphor, the word describes a world in chaos”. To which can be added Wyndham Lewis’s words : “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there at that point is the Vorticist”. And King again, “The Vorticist is therefore positioned on the narrow border between order and chaos…….Vorticist art inhabits a realm where chaotic energy is harnessed”.   

I don’t want to complicate matters but it has sometimes been suggested that Vorticism is a kind of English variation of Futurism, a movement largely originating in Italy and with adherents in Russia prior to the First World War. Lewis certainly wouldn’t have agreed. King has a useful chapter on Futurism, and its propagandist, Filippo Marinetti, but points out that, with the exceptions of David Bomberg and C.R.W. Nevinson, none of the artists associated with Vorticism displayed a great deal of interest in Futurism. Its bombast and violence had little appeal in England.

King lists seven artists as central to the Vorticist movement : Wiliam Roberts, David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Wyndham Lewis, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. There were a few others who, in one way or another, were influenced by, or were independently working along similar lines to the Vorticists. I mentioned C.R.W. Nevinson earlier, and Frederick Etchells can be seen as having leanings towards Vorticism. His 1914 oil on canvas “Woman at a Mirror” certainly inclines in that direction. King also brings in Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and one or two others to fill out the ranks of the Vorticists and near-Vorticists, and points to the interconnections with Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop. The emphasis on design at Omega gave some artists an opportunity to put their interest in abstraction, especially of the geometric variety, to commercial use, where it could be effective. Shown outside that context, as in a gallery, it tended to leave itself open to the charge that, to quote an American art critic, “it belongs to mechanical or ornamental design rather than to art”.

Wyndham Lewis was the towering figure of Vorticism, and it’s difficult to imagine the movement coming to life, let alone leaving a record in art history, without his presence. Paintings like the 1914 chalk and gouache on paper “Red Dust “, and the 1914-15 oil on canvas “Workshop” are, I think, what Vorticism was about. Even the striking 1921 oil on canvas “Praxitella”, a “portrait of the film critic Iris Barry”, painted when, to all intents and purposes, the movement was finished might be seen as still having a link to Vorticism. King says that it was in 2022 that two students at the Courtauld, “using X-ray and digital technologies”, discovered that Lewis had painted over a canvas by Helen Saunders. Reading about his behaviour in general, and particularly with regard to women, doesn’t exactly make him out to have been a likeable character.

The front cover of King’s book shows William Roberts’s 1961-62 oil on canvas “The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915”, and it’s an illustration used more than once when books about the period are published. Peter Brooker’s Bohemia in London : The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is an example, and, in fact, is something that can usefully be referred to in relation to the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel and the  Cave of the Golden Calf, another establishment favoured by the Vorticists. Roberts, of course, in 1961 was painting the legend rather than the reality, though it’s noticeable that the two women in the painting, Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr, are almost there as an afterthought, being placed at the rear and nearly hidden by the assembled males. That very much was the reality in Vorticist circles. Roberts always claimed to be a Cubist rather than a Vorticist, though the insistence on labels can often cause confusion. His paintings don’t appear to fit directly into the Cubist category, but they are always identifiably by him. Perhaps he should have been content to have created a distinctive style and not worried about which group he belonged to.

David Bomberg didn’t care to be called a Vorticist. As stubborn and outspoken a type as Lewis, he was volatile and aggressive. Like Lewis, he wanted to “blow up” the established English art scene. Vanessa Bell described him as “intolerable” and cautioned Roger Fry against employing him at Omega. It’s fascinating to see how Bomberg, like Roberts and others taken on as War Artists, modified his style to suit the requirements for representational canvases. King tells the story of how Bomberg showed P.G.Konody (a critic responsible for commissioning artists to work for the Canadian War Memorial Fund) some charcoal sketches of tunnellers at work which were modernistic but also clearly realistic. Konody approved of them but rejected a larger oil on canvas version as a “futurist abortion”.

C.R.W. Nevinson similarly refused the Vorticist tag, though he doesn’t seem to have minded being labelled a Futurist. King describes him as “very much like Lewis – a profusely talented, self-assured braggart with a magnetic personality”. He formed a friendship with the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, and, as King says, almost immediately made a “remarkable adaptation… to Futurism”, as can be seen in the 1913 oil on canvas “The Arrival”, which mixes the abstract and the realistic as the bow of a large ship appears to cut through the hints of dockside activity. It’s an eye-catching painting. Nevinson, just as Bomberg did, adjusted his approach when he worked as a war artist. Recently, I received a postcard from a friend which was of his 1916 oil on canvas “Dog Tired”, a picture of a group of soldiers, jackets unbuttoned, sprawled on what look like piles of boxes and packing cases. It’s an evocative illustration. Weary men, grateful for a few minutes doing nothing. Nevinson turned away from Futurism after the war, perhaps because the sights he’d seen were at odds with Marinetti’s celebrations of machines and noise and violence. For anyone who finds, like I do, Nevinson’s work of interest, it’s worth looking at David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance : Five Young British Artists and the Great War (Old Street Publishing, 2009) for further information and insights.

If Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr were only just in the Roberts group portrait of the Vorticists, King pays them a little more attention. Both women seem to have been dominated by Lewis, and it’s likely that Saunders was in love with him, though her feelings weren’t reciprocated. Kate Lechmere was another female artist in Lewis’s orbit, but seemingly strong=willed enough to stand up to him when necessary. She helped Lewis set up the Rebel Arts Centre, his rival location to Fry’s Omega Workshop, by providing the money to pay the rent on the premises they used, though when she could no longer come up with the cash Lewis became abusive.   Lechmere was of the opinion that Saunders and Dismorr were “little lap-dogs who wanted to be Lewis’s slaves and do everything for him”. Dismorr came from a wealthy background and Lewis saw her as a source of funds by buying some of his paintings. When she refused, he fell out with her.

Leaving aside the personal relationships between Lewis and the women, I found Saunders’ paintings, as seen in the book, of interest, despite my misgivings about purely geometric abstraction. Her 1915 graphite and gouache on paper ”Dance” is attractive, while the 1915 graphite, black ink “Black and Khaki” has a similar appeal. Saunders appears to have eventually turned away from abstraction, as witness a late-1920s gouache on paper “Still Life”. It looks pleasant but ordinary.  Jessica Dismorr was initially influenced by the French Fauvists but moved into total abstraction and continued to associate with various avant-garde groups in the 1920s and 1930s. King describes her later work as “divided between pure abstraction and representational works – the latter nodding in the direction of Surrealism”.

It's obvious that the onset of the First World War in 1914 played a major role in breaking up the Vorticist group. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the talented sculptor of “Red Stone Dancer”, and the painter of a portrait of his partner, Sophie Brzeska, was French born. When war broke out he returned to France and joined the French army. He was killed in 1915. Edward Wadsworth, described by King as “a reticent person”, was “an outstanding student” at the Slade, where Roger Fry was a lecturer : “Through him Wadsworth became aware of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the other Post-Impressionists”. The 1913 oil on canvas “Rotherhithe” has a clear basis in the real world, but the 1915 gouache, ink and graphite on paper “Abstract Composition” is precisely that. Wadsworth was employed on the “dazzle-painting” programme designed as camouflage to confuse and deter German submarines preying on convoys.

There were attempts to revive interest in the Vorticist project after 1918, but its moment had gone. As Francis Spalding put it in The Real and the Romantic : English Art Between the Two World Wars (Thames & Hudson, 2022) : “artists who had witnessed or been involved in conflict and were sated with destruction, looked back with incredulity at some of the more extreme ambitions of the prewar avant-garde; at C.R.W. Nevinson’s claim that ‘there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness’ “. Spalding additionally notes : “The fact that piles of the magazine Blast, in which Wyndham Lewis had published the Vorticist Manifesto, sat around his studio in the post-war period, unwanted, does not surprise. Even Lewis himself admitted ‘The geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before now felt bleak and empty. They wanted filling.’ “

King discusses Blast in his book. There were only two issues, one in 1914, the other in 1915, before the war claimed the time and energies of many of the contributors. It’s instructive to look at the magazine’s contents and in particular at Lewis’s pronouncements about upsetting the apple cart of not only the English art establishment, but English society generally. “BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND : Curse its climate for its sins and infections”.  Quoting it this way doesn’t recognise the perhaps startling visual effect it may have had at the time, though I do wonder how many people actually did see the magazine? Spalding’s comment about all those unsold copies in Lewis’s studio is relevant.

Beyond the handful of leading Vorticists, as defined by King, he brings in a host of others who were involved. Ezra Pound (he originated the “Our Little Gang”  description) is there, as is T.E. Hulme, described as “the theorist” and sadly killed in the First World War. And there are references to Walter Sickert, the Camden Town artists, Jacob Epstein, and many more. King quite correctly puts the Vorticists in context. They were not operating in a vacuum, and what they were aiming for only has relevance if seen in relation to other work of the period.

‘Our Little Gang : The Lives of the Vorticists tells a stimulating story, told by James King in a clear and direct way.  His writing is intelligent and steers clear of art jargon and theorising. He outlines the personalities and their differences, which inevitably in any community inhabited by competing egos, were frequent and not unusual, but always places the art at the centre of his narrative. His book will appeal to those with a specialised interest in the development of avant-garde painting in England, but also to the general reader of art history. It is well-produced, is liberally illustrated, has notes, and a bibliography.