FROM THE HISTORY OF BRITISH MODERNISM: WYNDHAM LEWIS AND VORTICISM

Abstract

This article examines the role of artist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) in the formation and development of British modernism. He was a leader of Vorticism, an avant-garde movement that played a significant role in British art and cultural life in the 1910s. Lewis, along with friends, conceived and published BLAST magazine, which sought to subvert Victorian cultural traditions and create a new art inspired by the industrial world. Although he largely abandoned painting after the First World War, switching to journalism and novel writing, his work and ideas continued to influence subsequent generations of modernists, to such artists as Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. The article focuses primarily on Lewis’s prewar work, his artistic experiments of 1910–1915, and his activities as an organizer and theorist of Vorticism. Particular attention is paid to the journal BLAST and the manifesto published in it, through which Lewis sought to unite young British artists and set their art against the traditions of British artistic culture. The article demonstrates how the ideas of vorticism manifested themselves in the works of other members of the movement and how the First World War interrupted the development of their artistic experiment. It traces Lewis’s transition from figurative art to abstraction and his search for an artistic form corresponding to the new industrial age. This makes it possible to consider Lewis not only as the author of individual radical works, but also as one of the artists who played an important role in shaping a new conception of the British avant-garde.