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Blast: Vorticism 1914-1918

edited by Paul Edwards.
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington VT, U.S.A., 2000.
ISBN 1-84014-647-8.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
2022 X Avenue, Dysart,
IA 52224-9767,
U.S.A.
ballast@netins.net

Vorticism was a British-born art and literary movement that was founded in 1913 by P. Wyndham Lewis, a painter, novelist and critic, whose parents were British and American, and the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound. The name was coined by the latter, from the word ?vortex,? meaning an influence so compelling that everything within range is sucked into it. In part, it was inspired by Italian Futurism (which was preoccupied with machine age movement), so that most people commonly think of it now, too simplistically, as a composite of that and Cubism. As every cause has its manifesto, Vorticism?s was a short-lived magazine called BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex, which was first issued on July 15, 1914. In that issue, which is as much remembered for its typography as for its text, various things are ?blasted? (hence the magazine?s name), while others are ?blessed.? Humor, for example, is blasted as ?Quack ENGLISH drug for stupidity and sleepiness. Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalizing like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious chemistry of laughter?; yet, in the same issue, it is also later blessed as ?the great barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the ancient Fair of LIFE.? Originally published in German in 1996 as an exhibition catalog by two German museums, this book is a collection of essays by six of the subject?s leading experts (including Richard Cork, whose books are well-known), illustrated by 100 reproductions (forty of which are in color) of paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture by its various practitioners, among them Lewis himself, Edward Wadsworth (who contributed to WWI ship camouflage), David Bomberg, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Supplemented by biographical notes and a substantial bibliography, it offers a lucid yet solid account of a maverick branch of Modernism.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 17, No. 1, Fall 2001.)

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Updated 5 December 2001.




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