Canadian American Slavic Studies, 42, No. 4 (Winter 2008), 431-449.

PETER STUPPLES (Dunedin, New Zealand)

VORTJCISM AND MALEVICH'S SUPREMATISM

1. Introduction In 1976 Richard Cork claimed that the British Modernist movement known as Vorticism had an impact in Russia through an article on "The English Fu­ turists" by Zinaida Vengeroya published in the miscellany The Archer in Petro grad in 1915.1 V engerova based her ideas on an interview with Ezra Pound. She accompanied her article with a reproduction of Wyndham Lewis's Portrait ofan Englishwoman (1913 ). Cork's claim was repeated by Paul Edwards in his monograph on Lewis published in 2000: "Lewis's work of this period ... seems to have provided a stimulus to Malevich, Suprematism and hence to Constructivism." These claims have not bet:n examined in Malevich scholarship and this ar­ ticle attempts to explore the relationship between Vengerova's article in The Archer, the reproduction of Lewis's most radical abstract painting, and the development ofMalevich's Suprematism. 2. Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of an Englishwoman Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism2 was a particular amalgam of Modernist styles and sentiments, and was infused with his personal anger at the British establishment as well as his negative politics of resigned scepticism. Lewis's detachment from the newly emerging manifestations of British Modernism was emphasised by his break with the Bloomsbury group in 1913 and the pub­ lication of Blast No. 1 in June 1914. Yet, despite a rhetoric ofbambast, Vorti­ cism was short lived and Lewis's "abstraction" just as ephemeral. Both had almost run their course by the time of Vorticism's only art exhibition, at the Dore Gallery in June 1915. The first mature manifestation of both Vorticism and Lewis's "abstracting" tendency can be seen in his portfolio of drawings, completed in 1912 and pub­ lished in December 1913, illustrating Shakespeare's tragedy Timon ofAthens. These drawings fragment the picture plane, in the manner of Cubism, shot through with the "lines of force" of Futurism. They generally inhabit a shal-

I. Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles:.Univ. of California Press, 1976), 1:294. 2. As Lewis himself later explained: "The origin of the term 'Vorticism' was the idea of a mass of excited thinking, engrossed in a whirling centre. We all know, without applying to the dictionary, what is meant by a vortex. It is a violent central activity attracting everything to itself, absorbing all that is around it into a violent whirling - a violent central engulfing. An ingenious critic noticed that my position was offensively central, that I was at once calm and whirling, that I was at once magnetic and incandescent." Wyndham Lewis, "The Vorticists," Vogue (Sept. 1946). 432 Canadian American Slavic Studies/Revue Canadienne Americaine d'etudes Slaves

low pictorial space and ambiguously unite both schematicised figures and ob­ jects together with abstract elements. The images seem to relate to architec­ ture or machinery yet they make no sense to an eye trained in the conventions ofWestem art since the Renaissance. As Tom Normand pointed out, the Alcibiardes sheet (also known as The Thebai"de) clearly illustrates Bergson's "concept of reality as 'a flux of inter­ penetrated elements unseizable by the intellect,' and secondly, the belief in the artist's ability to enter 'intuitively' into this flux and comprehend its catas­ trophic actions."3 In later drawings of the Timon series Lewis imposed an aus­ tere, abstract, ordering authority on this free-flowing dynamism, thus follow­ ing T. E. Hulme in his criticism, and ultimate rejection, of Futurist pictorial devices and Bergsonian intuitivism. The elements of the city, the machine and dynamic movement, remained as motifs, even in the most mature of Vorticist works, such as Lewis's Composition of 1913.4 Lewis's resigned scepticism found theoretical justification in the writing of T. E. Hulme. Hulme rejected the positivisim of Modernism, with its hege~ monic assumption of human progress and control of the natural world in pur­ suit of a rational and material paradise. Hulme believed that democratic hu­ manism denied the finite capability of our species and abrogated any absolute, moral authority: For Hulme "a man is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of value by discipline- ethical and political."5 In place of humanism he advocated "The Religious attitude," acknowledging human fragility and transience in the face of an indifferent and hostile universe, together with the belief that "ethical values are not relative to human desires and feelings but absolute and objective." Hulme therefore rejected humanist art and looked in­ stead for a new classicism; not unlike the art of Ancient Egypt or Byzantium, expressing the authority of a single world-view. He envisaged this made manifest in a geometric abstraction, exemplified by Lewis's Vorticist draw­ ings. Here was a modern art underpinned by a theoretical programme. Simi­ larly Lewis, whilst he admired Picasso's dexterity and inventiveness, found the Spaniard's art essentially "without a purpose." Both Cubism and Futur­ ism, with their celebration of the crowd and mechanical progress, were found wanting of any moral imperative. Lewis's Portrait ofan Englishwoman is an abstract composition of pen and ink, pencil and watercolour of 1913.6 Lewis's "abstracf' compositions of

3. Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis: The Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 55. 4. Composition, pencil, pen and ink with watercolour and collage, 34 x 26.5, Tate Gallery, London, 1913. 5. T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London: Routledge, 1924), p. 47. 6. Lewis, Portrait ofan Englishwoman (M146), 1913, pen and ink, pencil, watercolour, 56 x 38, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut The numbering of Lewis's images after the 1et,ter "M" refers to the order given in Walter Michel's catalogue, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971 ). This system is also used by Paul Edwards.