The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World

About

Vorticism was one of the truly avant-garde movements in Britain. The group was named by American poet Ezra Pound, led by the painter Wyndham Lewis and included sculptors Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein and painters William Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth. These artists embraced the maelstrom of the modern world, their movement's name reflecting its position at the still centre of the vortex of modernity. The originality of this exhibition lies in its focus on the only two exhibitions in the lifetime of the Vorticist group: one in London in 1915 and the other in New York in 1917. It also highlights the group's journal BLAST, the design of which still seems shocking and original, and the rarely seen Vortographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn, claimed as the first abstract photographs, which were shown in London in 1917. This exhibition will set the movement in the wider historical and cultural contexts of early twentieth-century London.