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Home , David Bomberg, Dorothy Shakespear, Frederick Etchells, Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Lawrence Atkinson

‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’: :

New Perspectives (A symposium convened October

29-30, 2010, at the Nasher Museum of Duke

University, Durham, NC) ______

Michael Valdez Moses

The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in and New York, 1914-1918 , the only major exhibition of Vorticist art to be held in the United States since and organized the first American show of Vorticist art at the Penguin Club of New York in 1917, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at on September 30. Curated by Mark Antliff (Professor of at Duke University) and Vivien Greene (Curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City), this major exhibition of ’s only ‘home-grown’ avant-garde brings together many of the works exhibited at the three exhibitions organized by the various members of the Vorticist movement during its brief existence: the first Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915, the 1917 Penguin Club exhibition in New York City, and the exhibition of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ‘Vortographs’ (Vorticist photographs) held at the London Camera Club in 1917. The Vorticists runs at the Nasher through to the 2 nd of January 2010 before moving to the Guggenheim in Venice and then to Britain. The exhibition displays , paintings, watercolours, collages, prints, drawings, vortographs, books, and journals produced by a group of artists and writers, including , , Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, , , Christopher Nevinson, , Alvin Langdon Coburn, , , , , William Roberts, and Ezra Pound, who loosely comprised, or were closely associated with, the Vorticist movement that briefly flourished in London and (to a lesser extent) New York in the second decade of the past century.

150 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’

In conjunction with the exhibit that showcases such epochal works as Epstein’s Rock Drill and Female Figure in Flenite, Gaudier- Brzeska’s (Hieratic) of Ezra Pound and Red Stone Dancer , Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd , Helen Saunders’s Dance , and a first edition of BLAST 1, Mark Antliff and Scott Klein (Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wake Forest University) organized a symposium held on October 29 th and 30 th 2010 at Duke University entitled Vorticism: New Perspectives (from which an edited anthology of papers is currently being derived). Participants included Mark Antliff, Scott Klein, Paul Edwards, Fredric Jameson, Rebecca Beasley, Andrzej G Ċsiorek, Jonathan , Jonathan Wood, Allan Antliff, Miranda Hickman, Anne McCauley, Douglas Mao, Martin Puchner, and Sarah Stanners. In one of two keynote addresses, ‘ BLAST and Vorticism Exploded’, Edwards posed a series of questions that haunted the proceedings: Was Vorticism a coherent aesthetic movement? Was there anything that united the various works and projects of such a varied array of artists? Were there any integral or essential features that defined Vorticist painting, sculpture, photography, and literature? Was Vorticism anything more than (Wyndham Lewis’s) one-man movement? Edwards’s address emphasized the improvisatory and heterogeneous character of Vorticism as Lewis, Pound, and others developed it between 1913 and 1915. Edwards shed light on the byzantine and highly contingent manner in which the first issue of BLAST was assembled. As Edwards pointedly noted, the prints that appeared in the first July 1914 issue were set or commissioned long before the Vorticist manifestos that appeared in the volume were composed; indeed Lewis put together the issue in three distinct stages over six months, and it was only during the last phase of assemblage, some months after the initial plans for BLAST had been made and well after much of the first number had already been set, that Lewis introduced the critical terms ‘Vortex’ and ‘Vorticism’ into the issue. According to Edwards, ‘Vorticism’ was a kind of belated or last minute coinage that reflected Lewis’s response to immediate and rapidly changing circumstances, such as his break with Marinetti and Italian that had occurred in June of 1914, months after the assemblage of BLAST 1 was underway. The first exhibition of Vorticist art at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915 offers further evidence of the ad hoc, fluid, and internally conflicted character of a movement that reflected the shifting loyalties, tactical alliances, and widespread rivalries of its numerous participants. The 1915 Doré Gallery show included works not only by self-identified Vorticists du jour

151 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies such as Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Dismorr, Etchells, Wadsworth, Saunders, and Roberts, but also works by ‘invited’ artists, including Nevinson, who considered himself a Futurist (and who had fallen out with Lewis in June of 1914), and the Post-Impressionist painter, , a representative of the Bloomsbury school that had come in for harsh treatment in the first issue of BLAST . To make matters even murkier, Epstein’s were conspicuously absent from the 1915 exhibition. Edwards thus made a persuasive case that Vorticism should be understood not so much as a theoretically consistent and internally cohesive literary and art movement, but rather as a revolutionary process the outcome of which could not be predicted even by those who were its principal architects and practitioners. But if Vorticism was not an ideologically coherent movement (whose chief theoreticians and promoters were Lewis and Pound), it was a literary and artistic practice deeply, even fatally, entangled with a profoundly theoretical approach to art and culture. In fact, the incoherent and inchoate character of the movement perhaps owed much to its (over) investment in many different and sometimes contradictory theories. Mark Antliff’s paper, ‘Politicizing the New Sculpture’, explored Pound’s and Gaudier-Brzeska’s indebtedness to the anarcho- individualist and nominalist theories of Dora Marsden (editor of the journals The Freewoman and The Egoist ), who was in turn inspired by the philosophic writings of Max Stirner and Henri Bergson. Alan Antliff, in his talk, ‘Man Ray – Vorticist’, likewise emphasized the indirect influences of Stirner’s anarcho-individualist philosophy and the aesthetic writings of and Friedrich Nietzsche on the early paintings of Man Ray, who in 1914 and 1915 followed a Vorticist trajectory before coming under the influence of and moving off in the direction of an anti-formalist aesthetic. But these quite varied theoretical sources were by no means the only ideological wellsprings for Vorticism as the movement changed, developed, sub- divided, and ultimately expired between 1913 and 1919. As Fredric Jameson, in the second keynote address, ‘Odious Combinations: Visualizing the Political in Words’, emphasized, Wyndham Lewis’s extensive theoretical writings were indebted to a bewildering array of thinkers. Even a casual reader of The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), both published some years after Vorticism had played itself out as a vital movement, can discern in Lewis’s thought the influences not only of Bergson, Nietzsche, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead – whose ‘time’ philosophies Lewis explicitly rejects –

152 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ but also those of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Marx, Henry Maine, Proudhon, Vladimir Lenin, Le Bon, and Sorel, to name only a few of the most conspicuous thinkers whose writings exerted a fascination, though not always an attraction, for the ex-arch- Vorticist. Jameson’s critical assessment of Lewis’s political theorizing as ‘intellectual doodling’, while denying to it any stringent philosophic coherence, nonetheless emphasized that Lewis’s early opinionated, gossipy, and often satiric forays into aesthetic criticism, like his somewhat later ones into political philosophy, provide the necessary background for any informed appreciation of Lewis’s momentous contributions to avant-garde art in the and after. One important insight that thus emerged from the papers delivered was the notion that the aesthetic practices of the Vorticists crucially depended on their absorption and/or rejection of a multitude of competing theories about the nature of and the relationship of the artist to modernity. In his talk, ‘Modern Art in England circa 1914: Hulme and Lewis’, Andrzej G Ċsiorek laid emphasis upon the ways in which Lewis’s negotiation of a unique space for Vorticism (between those already occupied by and Futurism) involved an intense exchange with the aesthetic and cultural criticism of T. E. Hulme. Lewis attempted retrospectively (and perhaps inaccurately or even disingenuously) to ally his own Vorticist paintings with Hulme’s celebration of geometric and . But whereas Hulme was committed to an anti-humanist, anti-progressive revolution in Western metaphysics, one that would shatter the hold of humanism upon the European imagination, Lewis seemed intent upon creating an objective, geometric, and abstract art that directly confronted and made use of the forms of the contemporary machine age. As opposed to Hulme, who explicitly sought to overcome modernity, Lewis understood his Vorticist aesthetic as the means of representing (however critically) the distinctive forms of modern life. A decisive break with the modern age was, for Lewis, not possible, nor was its evasion desirable. But if, according to G Ċsiorek, Lewis ultimately distanced himself from Hulme’s critical pronouncements, his own art was no less a response to Hulme’s theoretical provocation. Even when seeking to practise his art, Lewis necessarily had to negotiate a cultural environment in which theory was inescapable. Unlike Elizabethan theatre or the Victorian novel, but very much in the germinal spirit of early seventeenth-century Italian opera or European romantic poetry,

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Vorticism was a movement that emerged from the theoretical debates and philosophical issues that provided the matrix of its birth. The relationship of Vorticism to the machine age and to modern industrialism, capitalism, and commerce provided the focus of several of the papers delivered. Jonathan Black’s ‘Constructing a Chinese-Puzzle Universe: Edward Wadsworth, Industry, British Identity and Vorticist Yorkshire’, illuminated the profound and unexpectedly congenial influence of Yorkshire’s industrial landscape upon the Vorticist woodcuts of Wadsworth, a reproduction of whose print, Typhoon , provided the cover image for the conference programme. Wadsworth, the privileged son of a wealthy mill owner from Yorkshire, found in the geometric forms of Yorkshire factories and English docks and shipyards the inspiration for his Vorticist revival of the medieval German woodcut. According to Black, far from recoiling from the oppressive angularity and inhumane scale of these built environments, Wadsworth offered to bring to bear the techniques of the German avant-garde (especially those of the Dresden-based Die Brücke ) on a modern industrial British landscape: his abstract and geometric art illustrated Lewis’s notion that the English avant-garde would have to engage and represent the environment as it actually existed in the modern age (hence its lingering allegiance to mimetic art). Wadsworth’s prints do not merely engage, they celebrate the great age of Britain’s industrial might. His enthusiasm for the dynamism, pattern, force, and commercial audaciousness of the machine age bespeaks a lurking ideological kinship between Vorticism and Futurism that Lewis’s manifesto in the first volume of BLAST was keen to deny. Wadsworth’s block prints suggest another ideological rift within Vorticism, as their apparent exaltation of the vertiginous power of a capitalist economy cannot be easily reconciled with Lewis’s and Pound’s frequent and vociferous criticisms of modern commerce and modern Western capitalism. Black’s talk, like those of Jameson, Edwards, G Ċsiorek, Mark and Allan Antliff, cast much light on the vexed question of the politics of Vorticism. The movement was necessarily shadowed by the turbulent and divisive issues of the day: the Home Rule crisis in Ireland and the Army mutiny in Ulster, the violence of the suffragette movement, the radicalization of labour, the constitutional crisis in the House of Lords, and ultimately the First World War whose explosiveness and sheer volume mocked the ‘blast’ of the Vorticists. The War siphoned off many of the most talented members of the movement (Lewis, Nevinson, Bomberg, Wadsworth, and Epstein served in the armed

154 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ forces, while Dismorr went to France as a nurse with the American Friends Service Committee), and ended the all-too-brief life of both T. E. Hulme (not a Vorticist per se) and one of its most promising artistic talents, Gaudier-Brzeska, killed on the western front even before the second (and last) issue of BLAST appeared in July of 1915. The emergence of Vorticism on the eve of the great European conflagration necessarily meant that the movement was dogged by questions of political loyalty, patriotism, and national identity. The second July 1915 ‘War’ number of BLAST reflected Lewis’s attempt to solidify the place of Vorticism as the English avant-garde movement, but as Scott Klein suggested in his paper, ‘How German is It: Vorticism, Nationalism, and the Paradox of Aesthetic Self-Definition’, the influence on Vorticism of the German avant-garde, particularly that of Expressionist movements such as Die Brücke and , is demonstrable. Many of the Vorticists, such as Wadsworth, Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska (as well as T. E. Hulme), had spent formative years in Germany before the war, and Lewis himself, even in his most anti-German phase during the hostilities, implicitly conceded that the influence on the English avant- garde of a higher and more rarified German culture could be benign, even generative. If the War provided the occasion for a tactical assertion of Englishness on the part of many of the Vorticists, it could not entirely obscure the strikingly cosmopolitan character of the movement and its members. Lewis, after all, was born in Canada; Pound, Epstein, Coburn hailed from the United States; Gaudier-Brzeska came from France. The War thus marked not so much a crystallization of the incipient nationalism of a rebarbative English avant-garde (though such a strain surely did exist within this deeply conflicted and heterogeneous movement), as a temporary hiatus in the cosmopolitan, exogamous, synthetic, and transnational ambitions of those artists who temporarily rallied under the banner of Vorticism. Indeed, as Rebecca Beasley suggested in her talk, ‘Vortorussophilia’, by 1940 Lewis was retrospectively associating and comparing Vorticism with other abstract artistic movements across Europe including not only those in France, Italy, and Germany, but also those in Russia (though there seems to be little evidence of the direct influence of Russian or Futurism on Vorticism before or during the First World War, notwithstanding Lewis’s interest in and knowledge of ’s art and criticism). Interestingly, Lewis had provocatively (and for many critics, problematically) divided up Europe into two distinct cultural groups, one Northern and one Southern. During the

155 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies years of the First World War, Lewis began to insist that the English avant-garde should embrace Russia as the standard bearer of Northern culture. Beasley argued that Lewis’s investment in Russian art and culture during the War coincided with his need to find a substitute for that other representative of ‘Northern’ culture, Germany, whose art and literature Lewis had vigorously promoted before August 1914. The profound interest and investment of Vorticism in primitive art has long been acknowledged, but several of the papers emphasized how the neo-primitivist elements in the sculptures of Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, and Lewis’s and Pound’s claim that the Vorticists were ‘primitive mercenaries’, bespoke an impatience with the traditions of Western art, a critical posture towards Eurocentric culture that mitigates the charges of nationalism, racism, and ethno-centricism that have dogged the Vorticist legacy. Jonathan Wood’s ‘Birth, Death and Epstein’s Vorticist Sculpture’ emphasized Epstein’s sculptural neo- primitivist explorations of the elemental events of birth and death; and Mark Antliff’s previously mentioned paper on ‘Politicizing the New Sculpture’ brought welcome attention to the relationship between Pound’s and Gaudier’s anarchistic leanings and their fascination with the atavistic art of non-Western cultures, such as the monumental statues of Easter Island and the massive sculptures of ancient Nineveh. Gaudier’s and Pound’s embrace of primitive non-Western art, however genuinely felt and theoretically justified, was, Antliff argued, prompted by an internecine dispute among Western European artists. By advocating a ‘New Sculpture’ based on primitive non-Western models, both Gaudier and Pound were rejecting Edmund Gosse’s earlier defence of the academic (and neo-classical) sculpture of the 1890s, which was also titled ‘The New Sculpture’. To celebrate the standing statues of Easter Island or the winged human-headed stone bulls of ancient Nineveh was to rebel against the precepts and principles of late Victorian art. In a similar vein, Anne McCauley’s fascinating paper, ‘Witch- Work, Art-Work, and the Meanings of Abstraction: Coburn, Pound and the Vortographs’, brought to light the spiritualist, pre-rationalist, and quasi-magical dimensions of Coburn’s and Pound’s experiments with ‘Vortographs’: abstract Vorticist photographs. Even as he generated the recognizable geometric, abstract, and even non-representational forms that characterized much Vorticist art, Coburn conceived of his experimental vortographs – the first recognized examples of a purely – as a form of ‘scrying’. And he described the experimental photographic apparatus that he and Pound constructed, a

156 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ triangular shaped shaft composed of three mirrors into which he could place crystals, prisms, and the camera lens, as a kind of mechanical crystal ball. Notwithstanding Lewis’s later withering critique of the contemporary European cult of the savage in Paleface (1929), the elitist, racialist, nationalistic, or even militant elements of Vorticism must thus be balanced against its cosmopolitan, anti-Western, non-Eurocentric, and even anti-imperial proclivities. Several papers treated the complex engagement of the Vorticists with the politics of gender. From its beginnings, female writers and artists played an important if underappreciated role in the Vorticist movement. Dora Marsden’s anarcho-individualism, as Mark Antliff noted, proved an inspirational fount for Pound, Gaudier, and Man Ray. The Doré Gallery exhibition of 1915 featured several important paintings by Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr. Dorothy Shakespear, whose watercolours and collages at the Nasher are among the most strikingly beautiful and evocative works on display, was one of the key members of the Vorticist movement from its inception. In her paper ‘Vorticist Feminism: Rereading, H.D., Dismorr and Saunders’, Miranda Hickman made the challenging and (to my mind) persuasive claim that Dismorr and Saunders appropriated the hard, objective, abstract, and geometric qualities of Lewis’s putatively masculinist Vorticist aesthetic for their own feminist-inspired ends. What was in Lewis’s hands an assertion of masculine ego, a dismissal of effeminacy, and a none too subtle homophobic reproof to the Bloomsbury school, became in their work an affirmation of the new woman: independent, hard-edged, professional, objective, assertive, and fully modern. Hickman’s paper thus implicitly suggested that the Vorticist interest in the suffragette movement (a prominent member of which was ‘blessed’ in the first issue of BLAST ) was much more than a mere topical aside. Indeed it becomes possible to speak confidently of an avant-garde feminist iteration of Vorticism. Given Lewis’s later brief but unfortunate infatuation with Hitler’s national socialism, most evident in his 1931 book, Hitler , and Pound’s enthusiastic embrace of Mussolini and Italian fascism that began with the poet’s move to Rapallo in the 1920s and which continued until the end of the Second War when Pound was arrested by occupying American forces and charged with treason, critics have unsurprisingly cast considerable suspicion on the political energies that powered Vorticism, asking if the movement did not in some way anticipate or foreshadow the later nefarious political trajectories of its two most

157 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies eloquent and voluble champions. In a virtuoso investigation of the political dimensions of Vorticist art and Lewis’s theoretical writings, Fredric Jameson, who numbers among his many books, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist (1981), offered the surprisingly sympathetic view that, from his early days as a Vorticist onward, Lewis consistently sought a privileged space for the avant-garde artist and his art, a utopia (a non-place, a good place) beyond or outside of the realm of politics. Rejecting the notion that Lewis harboured sinister political ambitions or that he was eager to impose a form of tyrannical rule upon a philistine population, Jameson insisted that Lewis thought of politics in purely instrumental terms, as a means by which the avant-garde artist might, paradoxically, be freed from the Machiavellian realities of political life. Jameson’s unabashed and infectious enthusiasm for Lewis’s art and writing, and his careful exploration of the aesthetico-political aspirations that characterized the whole of Lewis’s career, thus unexpectedly converged at moments with Mark Antliff’s claim that Lewis, Pound, and Gaudier were united by their common veneration of individualism, the individualistic artist, and the unique work of art, and by their mutual distrust of authoritative traditions, state power, and the homogenizing effects of big business and large commercial enterprise in collusion with governmental authority. Perhaps the greatest and most enduring legacy of Vorticism will prove to be that the demand made by many of its practitioners and theorists on behalf of untrammelled artistic freedom helped to generate a breath-taking array of new aesthetic modes, genres, and forms for the modern age. The unbridled aesthetic ferment of the movement affected lyric poetry, drama, fiction, art criticism, political theory, sculpture, oil painting, watercolour, block printing, engraving, photography, orthography, magazine layout, poster design, and book illustration. To be sure, not all of these new revolutionary modes and orders have survived the evolutionary cultural process. Martin Puchner’s wonderfully suggestive paper ‘World and Stage in Enemy of the Stars ’ offered an original generic analysis of Lewis’s major play, illuminating the hybridized multi-generic character of this sui generis work. A modernist closet drama, a play as manifesto, a drama of ideas, a theatrical work designed to construct a unique world, (and, I am tempted to add, like Thomas Hardy’s idiosyncratic The Dynasts , a cinematic fantasy rendered via lexical means), The Enemy of the Stars has remained an enigmatic and anomalous work, one that tends to resist

158 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ analysis or categorization. It is so richly peculiar, so difficult to classify, that its very singularity has rendered it culturally sterile. A work of its time, it has no progeny. In his ‘Blasting and Disappearing’, Douglas Mao noted that the Vorticists, like many other avant-garde artists of the age, were unusually and even dangerously invested in their own contemporaneity, in the currency, notoriety, and ephemeral celebrity of their movement. Indeed for any movement to cease moving means that it ceases to exist. The obscurity into which the First World War (which was The Great Contemporary Event of August of 1914 and after) cast Vorticism, threatened not merely to eclipse the Vorticists and their works, but to render them forever after a cultural irrelevance, a mere historical curiosity. But just as one must not judge the Vorticists solely by those generic and formal experiments of theirs that didn’t ‘work’ – and after all, the experimental method depends crucially on those experiments that do not work to verify those that do – so too must one estimate the cultural significance of the Vorticist contribution to the modern age by the ways in which Vorticism has continued to fructify the artistic and cultural landscape long after it ceased to be the centre of attention and the maelstrom of popular interest. Both Jonathan Black’s talk and Sarah Stanners’s presentation, ‘Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis and Counterblast ’, revealed that the legacy of Vorticism has lived on in the decades following the ‘official’ end of Vorticism in 1919. Stanners demonstrated that several of McLuhan’s most original cultural interventions of the 1950s and 1960s grew out of his deep and abiding interest in Lewis’s work, and most particularly in BLAST . McLuhan’s 1954 pamphlet, Counter-Blast , a critique of the Massey Report later expanded into book form in 1969, was directly inspired by Lewis’s journal (right down to the orthography and layout of both MacLuhan’s pamphlet and book), and many of McLuhan’s most memorable and provocative concepts, the ‘global village’ and ‘acoustic space’, Stanners maintained, were inspired by Lewis’s work. BLAST , Lewis’s Vorticist response to the machine age, provided the model for Counter-Blast , McLuhan’s late twentieth-century response to the electronic age. Nor was Lewis’s and the Vorticists’ influence limited to high theory and the new field of media studies. As Jonathan Black illustrated, Vorticist sculpture in general, and Epstein’s Rock Drill in particular, have continued to exert a profoundly generative influence on contemporary sculpture, most especially that of the British artist Michael Sandle and the British-Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu.

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The impressive, erudite, and perceptive array of papers presented at Vorticism: New Perspectives revealed that Vorticism can more profitably be understood not as a movement, but as a set of highly charged and curiously entangled movements. Perhaps we should speak of Vorticisms (plural) rather than Vorticism (singular) to describe the explosion of cultural energy the burst upon the English landscape before the First World War. Indeed, if one were to think of a literal vortex, an immense whorl of dust and air – a tornado – one might grasp the inadequacy of any definition that tries to freeze this dangerous and powerful cultural formation for the sake of a neat and theoretically pristine categorical definition. Its very character is not to stop, not to stay in one place, not to track according to a predictable path: it draws in and ejects all manner of foreign objects, transforming the landscape in its wake. Fascinating, horrifying, inspiring, Vorticism has proved that paradoxical thing, a cultural cyclone, a vortex of energies set loose upon the modern world.

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