Blast England

The first issue of BLAST went on sale in London on 2 July 1914. It was large, it was printed in a bright pink that Wyndham Lewis called violent and other people called puce, and the first twenty pages consisted of a manifesto set in the heaviest sans-serif type available, arranged on the page like shouting.

Thirty-three days later Britain declared war on Germany.

What it was

Vorticism was England’s one indigenous modernist movement, and it was assembled with a certain amount of resentment.

Cubism was French. Futurism was Italian, and Marinetti had been over doing extremely successful publicity in London, which annoyed Lewis considerably. Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops were the established outlet for advanced art in England and Lewis had fallen out with Fry spectacularly, walking out and setting up the Rebel Art Centre in Great Ormond Street in March 1914 on money from the painter Kate Lechmere.

Ezra Pound supplied the name. In a letter at the end of 1913 he had described the London scene as a vortex; Lewis took the word and built a movement on it. The proposition was a hard, geometric, machine-conscious art — the energy of Futurism without the Italian romance about speed, the abstraction of Cubism without the French good manners.

BLAST was the vehicle: Review of the Great English Vortex, edited and largely written by Lewis, printed by a firm called Leveridge & Co., whose head may well have done some of the design.

The lists

The famous part is the manifesto, which proceeds by cursing and blessing things in turn, in enormous type.

Lewis did not invent the device. He took it from Apollinaire’s Futurist manifesto of the previous year, which had run two columns headed roughly to hell with and roses to. What Lewis added was the typography and the perversity.

The great joke of BLAST, and a deliberate one, is that the lists contradict each other. England is blasted, at length, for its climate, its politeness, its humour, its aesthetic cowardice. And then England is blessed, at similar length, for its ports, its ships, its industry, its hairdressers.

Both lists mean it. This is not fence-sitting; it is a fairly precise statement of what an English avant-garde would have to be — one that despises the country’s culture and loves its machinery, and cannot separate the two because the machinery is what the culture produced.

The manifesto was signed by Lewis, Pound, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Two of those signatories are women, in a manifesto of aggressive machine-worship in 1914.

What was actually in it

More than people remember. Alongside the manifesto and Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars, the first issue carried a Rebecca West story and an extract from a novel by Ford Madox Hueffer called The Saddest Story, which was published the following year, under a different title, as The Good Soldier.

The second issue, in July 1915 — the War Number — printed two poems by a young American in London named T. S. Eliot: Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night.

And it printed Gaudier-Brzeska’s Vortex, written from the trenches, in which he reports that his aesthetic convictions are unchanged by the experience of being shot at.

He was killed at Neuville-Saint-Vaast in June 1915, aged twenty-three. T. E. Hulme, the movement’s philosopher, was killed in 1917.

Why it ended

The usual account is that the war killed Vorticism, and it did, but not only by killing people.

The problem was more awkward than that. BLAST had spent 1914 celebrating hardness, machinery, violence and the beauty of the industrial. Then the country spent four years demonstrating exactly what industrialised violence looks like at scale, and the aesthetic position became difficult to hold with a straight face. Lewis served on the Western Front as a gunner and came back to paint war pictures that are magnificent and are not really Vorticist.

There were two issues.

What survived

The typography, mostly. Those pages — the shouting caps, the arbitrary rules, the deliberate ugliness of the setting — are one of the two or three points from which the entire twentieth-century tradition of expressive graphic design descends. You can trace a line from BLAST to punk, and people do.

The paintings are thinner on the ground, because a great many Vorticist works were lost or destroyed, and the movement had about eighteen months to make anything.