London.- Tate Britain presents a major exhibition about Vorticism, one of the truly avant-garde movements in British history. The revolutionary group of artists, the Vorticists, so-called by American poet Ezra Pound and led by the painter Wyndham Lewis, reacted against the culture of Edwardian England with a radical new aesthetic that embraced the maelstrom of the modern world. This exhibition celebrates the electrifying force and vitality of this movement by focusing on the period between 1914-18, using significant new research to examine the only two Vorticist exhibitions mounted in the lifetime of the group: one in London in 1915 and the other in New York in 1917. “The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World” is on view until Setpember 4th.
Bringing together over 100 key Vorticist works including paintings, sculptures, photography, journals and literary ephemera, new light is shed on the internationalism of the movement, particularly its links to the American avant-garde. The focus on the two historic exhibitions in London and New York will show the importance of a transatlantic exchange of ideas in the origins and legacy of the Vorticists. Including seminal works such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound 1914 and Wyndham Lewis’s Workshop c 1914-15, it will highlight the important role of visionary collector John Quinn, who, together with Ezra Pound, facilitated the introduction of Vorticism to an American audience through the 1917 New York show at the Penguin Club.
The exhibition will also highlight two other key presentations of the Vorticists’ ideas. A section will be devoted to the group’s ground-breaking journal ‘BLAST No.1: Review of the Great English Vortex’ from 1914 and ‘BLAST War Number: review of the Great English Vortex’ from 1915, showing its powerful design and literary contributions by, for example, T.S. Eliot and Ford Madox Ford. A further section reveals the rarely seen Vortographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn, claimed as the first abstract photographs, which were shown in the Camera Club in London in 1917.
A pivotal modernist movement, Vorticism emerged in London in 1914, when the advent of French Cubism and Italian Futurism was having a profound impact on the English art scene. Absorbing elements from these, but also defining themselves against these foreign idioms, the Vorticists forged their own distinctive style combining machine-age forms and the energetic imagery suggested by a vortex. With self-proclaimed leader Wyndham Lewis, the group included sculptors Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein and painters William Roberts, David Bomberg and Edward Wadsworth. The Vorticists were also distinctive for counting several female members in their ranks, among them Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear and Helen Saunders. An important group of works by Saunders from the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at The University of Chicago will be included.
Further highlights will include seminal Vorticist works such as the iconic sculpture, ‘Rock Drill’, 1913-15, by Jacob Epstein, the bold zig-zagging forms of ‘The Mud Bath’, 1914 by David Bomberg and ‘The Crowd’ by Wyndham Lewis from 1915. There will also be the rare chance to see international loans such as Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Architect with Green Tie’ (1909) from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World is co-organised by Tate Britain with the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art. Located in London, it is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection. The other three galleries are Tate Modern, also in London, Tate Liverpool, in the north-west, and Tate St Ives, in Cornwall, in the south-west. The entire Tate Collection is available online. Tate Britain is the world centre for the understanding and enjoyment of British art and works actively to promote interest in British art internationally. The displays at Tate Britain call on the greatest collection of British art in the world to present an unrivalled picture of the development of art in Britain from the time of the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, to the present day. The Collection comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and international modern art. Some of the highlights of the Tate collection of British art include rich holdings of portraiture from the age of Queen Elizabeth I; of the work of William Hogarth, sometimes called the father of English painting; of the eighteenth-century portraitists Gainsborough and Reynolds; of the animal painter George Stubbs; of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised British art in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth century of the work of Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. The very latest contemporary art is presented through the Art Now programme and the annual Turner Prize exhibition. Special attention is given to three outstanding British artists from the Romantic age. William Blake and John Constable have dedicated spaces within the gallery, while the unique J. M. W. Turner Collection of about 300 paintings and many thousands of watercolours is housed in the specially built Clore Gallery. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.tate.org.uk/britain