Vorticism

Short-lived British literary and artistic movement (1912–15), influenced by cubism and Futurism and led by Wyndham Lewis. Lewis believed that painting should reflect the complexity and rapid change of the modern world; he painted in a harsh, angular, semi-abstract style. The last Vorticist exhibition was held in 1915.

The aim was to build up ‘a visual language as abstract as music’ and also to make use of machine forms, which constituted as real a world to the artist as the forms of nature. Its manifesto appeared in the publication Blast in June 1914, of which only one other issue was published, in 1915. A number of distinguished artists had some association with the movement, including Henri Gaudier Brzeska, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, and David Bomberg. World War I halted Vorticist activity, but a number of Lewis's associates were later prominent in the London Group.