Into the Vortex

Great read I found today via 3quarksdaily:

The Crowd (1914-15) by Wyndham Lewis: a typical Vorticist painting “filled with lean, clear-cut vivacity and exhilarating colour”

“[T]he Vorticists placed the machine-age world at the heart of the work they produced. Like the Futurists, they believed that a new art in an emergent century should reflect the dramatically changing character of contemporary life. Unlike the Futurists, though, they did not view modern existence with rhapsodic enthusiasm.

A typical Vorticist painting like Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd (top) is filled with lean, clear-cut vivacity and exhilarating colour. But it takes a hard, critical view of mechanised prowess. Dehumanisation is a key theme, and so is a violence that threatens to burst through the boundaries of the picture. The Vorticists were bound to scorn the unqualified romanticism of the Futurists, whose country had begun to experience machine-age transformation at a far later stage.”

From “Into the vortex” by Richard Cork, Prospect magazine