Nineteen-fourteen was not a propitious time to announce a new artistic movement. In July of that year, however, the first edition of the artistic-literary magazine Blast appeared, declaring the birth of vorticism. Once a great deal of flim-flam had been sifted through, what the movement amounted to was a repudiation of both Victorian values and Bloomsbury aesthetics, and instead an acclamation of modernity, the machine age and non-traditional representation.
Vorticism was largely the brainchild of the painter and critic Percy Wyndham Lewis, who was supported by the upper echelon of the British-based avant-garde, numbering, among others, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, CRW Nevinson, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, William Roberts and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. “You think at once of a whirlpool,” wrote Wyndham Lewis. “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated; and there at the point of concentration is the vorticist.”
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