Machine gun
Bryan Robertson
Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Volume Two: Synthesis and Decline Richard Cork (Gordon Fraser 07.00)
In my teens in the 'forties, I grew up with the firm belief that everything bad about British art was more or less concentrated in the amateur provincialism of Bloomsbury. Time and experience have not tempered this view : I still think that what Arthur Waley, Maynard -Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf achieved was more or less admirable and that the paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell are irredeemably bad, though both artists showed youthful promise. It is impossible to think otherwise, given any painting by Cezanne or Matisse as a relevant standard for comparison. Clive Bell and Roger Fry wrote sensibly about French art and African sculpture, but as aesthetic missionaries among the ignorant British both men were dangerously flawed by enthusiasms, misplaced through friendship, for most of the worst art in England. There is also Fry's dreadful rubbery and leaden paintings and, in the essays, his blind contempt for Turner. Still in my teens, I ploughed eagerly through the novels and philosophical excursions of Wyndham Lewis, with special relish for the essays on art, bristling with epithets and capital letters, in Wyndham Lewis the artist: from Blast to Burlington House, and saw the historical importance of Lewis and the Vorticists as the first artists in England to have staked out a coherent formal identification with the new century. Moore and Nicholson came to maturity a little later; by the 'forties Vorticism had already receded into a forgotten past.
Apart from the difficulty of seeing any work, anywhere, by the Vorticist artists, my other worry then, as now, was the extent to which the drawings and paintings of Lewis, Bomberg, Roberts, Wadsworth and the other Vorticists in London might be seen as provincial in relation to the work done in Paris by Leger, Braque, Picasso—and Picabia and other minor but potent figures— and by the Constructivists and Suprematists in Moscow. Richard Cork's second and concluding volume of his brilliant treatise on Vorticism still doesn't quite clear my mind—but his text is already very long and if he had provided an extensive context of chronological and critical reference for European painting of the period in a body of text which concentrates in elaborate detail on the individual activities of the Vorticist artists, the subject would have been unmanageable.
Apart from the handful of works by
Lewis in the Tate (Rothenstein did well by Lewis, as well as securing fine works by other unfashionable artists like Burra and Spencer), and the Vorticist drawings by Lewis in treasured early editions of The Apes of God and From Blast to Burlington House, it was difficult, back in the 'forties, to find in London any representative works of the Vorticist period. Zwemmer's Gallery had a stock of Lewis drawings and Arnold Zwemmer occasionally showed me a few paintings by Lewis that he had in stock— nobody ever wanted to buy them. In 1947, I met Lewis for the first time—he was not an easy man to meet or to know—and we got on well together, but I had just returned from living in Paris for a year, exploring the studios of Brancusi and other artists, and Lewis seemed always to be far more interested in post-war life in Paris than in recalling the Vorticist days in London. Conversation about art was difficult, because Lewis had become increasingly reactionary about abstract art, which mainly interested me, and really saw art in the way described by his notorious pamphlet The Demon of Progress in the Arts.
My best mentor for Vorticism was Merlyn Evans, an artist of a much younger generation that I met in 1945, when 1 was also seeing Bomberg, who was only concerned with his current figurative painting. Evans was an extremely distinguished pioneer abstract painter in England, with a clear intellectual grasp of all the issues in modern art, including Vorticism, whose work for a time showed a strong kinship with Lawrence Atkinson. I set out these slight tokens of autobiography only to show how difficult it was, before Cork's arrival, to get any sense of the broad fabric of Vorticism; how dependent one was for information on direct contact with artists; and how unrewarding it was to find eventually that Lewis and Bomberg saw Vorticism as a dead issue, apart from staking personal claims for abstract innovation. For both men, the 1914-18 war ended any personal identification with abstraction.
Cork has brought the whole period back to life. The intellectual clarity with which he illuminates a factually and analytically dense narrative is sustained to the last page. His text continues chronologically from the first volume and moves, in the same way as before, from biographical information as it becomes relevant for each of the artists who supported, warmly or in more qualified ways, the machine-age thesis of Lewis, to extended and acute descriptions of individual works of art and explanatory accounts, when the Issues arise, of aesthetic speculation. Cork has kept a straight course: we are given just enough of the social and political life of the 1914 period, and perhaps a slightly restricted sense of the lives of the artists under discussion—what they read or listened to or enjoyed away from their work and apart from the theme of Vorticism—but the life of any artist is in his work, and Cork stays close to the work.
The compression has its dangers. In the
text which describes Bomberg's interest in dance and his friendship with Sonia Joslen, a dancer, we are told that The perhaps took his cue from abstract treatments of the theme, like Picabia's 1913 watercolour of Star Dancer and Her School of Dancing' for his own watercolour series of The Dancer, also begun in 1913. A small reproduction of the Picabia shows a connection but I would like to learn from the text just what that interesting dandy Picabia was up to in 1913, and what it had come from, and the precise degree of contact between events in Paris and London at the time for Bomberg and others is left in the air.
Bomberg's originality is not in dispute: his Dancer series quickly shed any vestige of influence from Picabia in far more linear and open structures that seem, from the reproductions in vol. 2, to prefigure a slightly later work by Rodchenko. But I had to look back to the first volume to find that 'Wadsworth's subscription during the latter half of 1913 to Les Soirees de Paris— which included many illustrations of Picabia's work—may have helped him to understand the latest developments in Europe more fully. .' and then wonder if Bomberg had pored through the same mags or whether he had contact with Picabia.
The games of 'influence' can be tedious and misleading: at certain points, a general stylistic consciousness is in the air as common property. But if much of English art has been and is provincial and if the general characteristics of Vorticism came from Cubism and Futurism, it is important for us to know exactly what it was that the English Vorticist painters and sculptors did that was not provincial.
The main reasons, finally, for the decline of Vorticism were, first, the abrasively Jacobean character of Lewis and the fact that artists don't like to be grouped together; second, the Vorticist artists had little intrinsically in common, and third, the 1914-18 war robbed their belief in the machine-age of any possible momentum because of the new destructive potential of machinery. Still more central is the fact that Marinetti's original manifestos were far too destructive for English taste: as an Italian, Marinetti had to destroy the tyranny of h is aesthetic past. But the English, except for professional historians, have always been extremely hazy about their own history—English artists are still less informed about their own culture—and Marinetti's fulminations had a rhetorical overkill which seemed excessive, even faintly ridiculous in England. There were, however, the Gothic Revival, the PreRaphaelites and morris dancing to consider and it is hard to be unmoved by Cork's account of the Vorticists' attempt to celebrate the ethos of a new century at a time when they were not much older than the century and were faced, almost at once, with the annihilative ferocity of the ethos gone wrong. Epstein's dilemma over the Rock Drill came from the realisation that the Machine had turned into a machine gun.
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