'We Discharge Ourselves on Both Sides': Vorticism: New Perspectives
‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’: Vorticism: 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 London and New York, 1914-1918 , the only major exhibition of Vorticist art to be held in the United States since John Quinn and Ezra Pound 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 Duke University on September 30. Curated by Mark Antliff (Professor of Art History at Duke University) and Vivien Greene (Curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City), this major exhibition of England’s only ‘home-grown’ avant-garde art movement 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 Tate Britain. The exhibition displays sculpture, paintings, watercolours, collages, prints, drawings, vortographs, books, and journals produced by a group of artists and writers, including Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, David Bomberg, Lawrence Atkinson, Christopher Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear, 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.
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