June 17, 2011
Tate Britain, London
Founded by the artist, writer, and polemicist, Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world. It was, in effect, a British equivalent to Futurism, although with doctrinal differences, and Lewis was deeply hostile to the futurists. Other artists involved with the group were Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth, and the sculptors Sir Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. David Bomberg was not formally a member of the group but produced major work in a similar style. The First World War brought Vorticism to an end, although in 1920 Lewis made a brief attempt to revive it with Group X.
This symposium sets the critical artistic movement within its wider cultural and historical context, asserting the importance of Anglo-American exchange and investigating Vorticism’s multi-disciplinarity through photography, painting, literature, and design. Presentations and panel discussions feature international speakers, including Mark Antliff, Rebecca Beasley, Richard Cork, Katy Deepwell, Paul Edwards, Andrzej Gasiorek, Vivien Greene, Alan Munton, Tom Normand, and Evelyn Silber, and showcase new scholarship spanning art, political, and literary history. Please click here to access all of the video files on the Tate website.