Blasting on
Bryan Robertson Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. Volume I: Origins and Development Richard Cork (Gordon Fraser £29)
In the last ten years, a handful of resourceful young art historians in England with a special interest in modern art have been attempting, with considerable vigour, to bring a lively scrutiny to bear on the evolution of art in England from, roughly speaking, the late Victorian period up to recent times. Their efforts, which are beginning to yield fascinating rewards, deserve all possible support and encouragement because we have been indifferent for too long to the history of modern art in England: a generalised and somewhat flabby concept of individual accomplishment has sufficed, in place of exact insights and records.
Three reasons come to mind for this omission. First, there has been for a long while a vague sense that art in England from around the turn of the century until quite recently was not, by the highest standards, very good and therefore probably best left undisturbed save for an occasional intriguing or dispiriting appearance in mixed anthologies. Second, the attitude to art shown by students in our art schools during the past two decades has not been conducive to any balanced exposition or study of the recent past, or indeed any kind of English past. The prevailing mood among young artists has been one of the rejection of the work of native forebears, more emphatically than ever before, and there has been little interest in research. Third, apart from a decade of local forays and movements from 1945-55, and the consistent independence of a handful of individual artists, art in this country has been dominated from 1956 until yesterday by the genius and, less interestingly and at a lower level, by the didactic principles of American art. English provincial insecurity was once summed up by the jingle: 'The French have taste in all they do. Which we are quite without. For Nature which to them gave gout. To us gave only gout'. After a post-war hiatus, the Americans took over for some fifteen years and that was not helpful to clear thinking about our own art history.
If this preamble seems excessively long, at the expense of Richard Cork's brilliant study of Vorticism, it is because my regard for his book is so high that I want to set his achievement in a historical context, and to explain the hitherto meagre contributions to modern English art history. There is one other incontrovertible reason for its paucity. The two wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 disrupted any possible imaginative momentum in English art, so that our painting and sculpture since 1900 have been restricted to a series of isolated flare-ups which lacked real continuity. The hopeful issues of the present and the future have seemed more vital than the immediate past, in the interwar years and since 1945.
And so they seemed, ironically enough, to Wyndham Lewis and his fellow artists in the few years up to 1914 when Vorticism had a caesarean birth from the Futurist Manifesto of Marinetti. Ezra Pound first wrote of 'the Vortex', Cork tells us, in a letter to William Carlos Williams in 1913, but he also makes it clear that Lewis was the central activating force in Vorticism. If Lewis's spoken and written inventions were sometimes erratic, they were conclusively directed toward a new dynamism and energy in formal structure which would replace all out-worn conventions in art. Geometric abstraction came into it from Hulme, pre-cubist flat planes of Cezanne came from Clive Bell's analysis of modern art, the swirling movement came, marginally, from Kandinsky as well as Severini, and the cult of mechanised form and a tremendous amount of exhortatory rhetoric came from Marinetti. Pound loved and applauded the work of Lewis and his friends, and embraced the Vorticist synthesis as a badly needed access of inspiration for his own Imagism.
But we are left with Lewis and his fellow artists, and it is clear that there was really no coherent movement with everyone involved in absolute sympathy with shared ideals. Nevinson, Roberts, Wadsworth, Epstein, and Gaudier-Brzeska were all intent upon their own separate paths; there were occasional common goals; there were only two artists of stature: Bomberg and Lewis. There were, however, a number of minor figures of great interest, notably Etchells, whose paintings and drawings have a delicate distinction of their own. Even if the war had not dispersed everyone, the movement would inevitably have been short-lived because its initial impulse came from Marinetti's Futurism, which exalted, among other things, mechanisation, and the English have been unresponsive to mechanical form.
Richard Cork has written an elaborately detailed survey of Vorticism. He is scrupulously fair to all the protagonists, with sufficient detachment to allow for clarity in the unfolding of a complicated and often confused adventure. He describes works of art with warm complicity, though he is always clear in his analyses. The book is an important contribution to art history, and with it Cork occupies a position of honour among those younger art historians who are busily setting the record straight.
If Lewis has to be considered as the selfproclaimed Enemy of flabby thinking and tired concepts in his own time, it is apt that Richard Cork should chronicle the fierce movement which Lewis engineered because, more than any other English critic in the past six years, Cork himself espoused new causes in art, new attitudes to its creation, and new movements that have disrupted conventional categories in painting and sculpture. Securing a platform on a popular newspaper, with an unprecedented amount of space at his disposal, he has filled it with news and explanations of work in video, artists' films, body and performance art, new processes, art and language, and radical strands in the politicisation of art. What Cork reports is often reprehensible to me, and I distrust the shakily pretentious or inaccurately based intellectual rationale so often employed by its practitioners. But Cork is trying to bring what he considers new blood into an anaemic body. I don't think it is anaemic so much as confused in its reflexes, but I respect Cork's idealistic involvement in a kill-or-cure treatment ; his superb book, on a different epoch, brings respect into line with admiration.
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