Vorticism: The original Anglo-Futurism? Part I

 In one of the more memorable anecdotes from Wyndham Lewis’s first autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, the Vorticist recounts meeting his Futurist counterpart, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in a lavatory (Marinetti had gone to wash after a particularly energetic lecture during which had “drenched himself in sweat”). With characteristically thrasonic gusto, the Italian declares that Lewis is a Futurist – and promptly inquires why he has not announced himself as such:

‘Because I am not one,’ I answered, just as point blank and to the point.
‘Yes. But what’s it matter!’ said he with great impatience.
‘It’s most important,’ I replied rather coldly.
‘Not at all!’ said he. ‘Futurism is good. It is all right.’
‘Not too bad,’ said I. ‘It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us.’

For those who view Vorticism simply as the English counterpart of Futurism—a precursor, perhaps, to today’s Anglo-Futurist movement—the tension revealed in this encounter between the founders of Europe’s leading avant-gardes should be illuminating. Their contretemps is all the more notable given the ostensible similarities between the two: both broke with tradition, both were preoccupied with the emergent machinic aesthetics of contemporary life, and as artists, both acted as “primitive mercenaries in the modern world”, capturing the “machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings”, “arsenals, and shipyards” on their canvases with the same savage force as a Magdalenian cave-artist in the Dordogne. Yet it was, in fact, as an act of secession from Futurism that Vorticism established its identity. While Lewis, like Marinetti, demanded that art be “organic with its time,” Vorticism’s aesthetic philosophy—in contrast to Futurism’s hot-blooded, Latin, and “feverish” bluster about the dynamism of modern life (speed, war, and technology)—was immobile, hard-edged, cold-blooded, and ‘Northern.’ Its primitiveness was ‘detached.’ Whereas Futurism felt the machine age “from within”, Vorticist art regarded its dynamism from the “outside, critically”—think Troilus and Cressida compared to The Iliad.

Vorticism’s “rebels of the North”, Lewis insisted, were a “diametrically opposed species” to the Futurists of the South. But no doubt because of its more austere character, Vorticism failed to secure the same influential legacy as its Mediterranean rival, becoming what Brian Sewell called “in the history of Western Art, no more than a hapless rowing-boat between Cubism and Futurism, the Scylla and Charybdis of the day”. In its day, however, Vorticism steered a decisive course between the ‘errors’ of its continental contemporaries, eschewing not only the unbridled esuberanza of Futurism’s techno-optimism but also the passivity and ‘deadness’ of Cubist abstractionism. Despite Cubism’s claim to the contrary, Lewis accused the Parisian movement of nature-copyism, critiquing Picasso as being a “miniature naturalistic sculptor of the vast natures-morte of modern life,” remarking that “however musical or vegetarian a man may be… his life is not spent exclusively amongst apples and mandolines”. The Vorticist manifesto, BLAST, derided Cubism’s still-lifes as being “a sort of machinery… machines without a purpose,” whose ‘naturalism’ enslaved the artist to the already existent ‘contrivances’ of the material world, the experience of which the Cubists merely sought to “reproduce” and “imitate like children”—he (Picasso), Lewis writes, “no longer so much interprets, as definitely MAKES, nature (and ‘DEAD’ nature at that).”

The ‘muscular dynamism’ of Futurism, with its rhythmic repetitions, blurring, and ‘lines of force’ (linee forze), thus served as an extremely important counterpoint and catalyst for Lewis, suggesting a model for a more active engagement with industrial life than that found in Cubism’s merely decorative modernism—a visual language that could explore the narrative possibilities of art in the machine age, rather than being a mere pasticheur of it. The converse problem with Futurism, as Lewis saw it, was its uncritical enthusiasm for the ‘melodrama of modernity’, and he characterised the “Futuristic gush” over speed and machinery as rendering the Latins the “most romantic and sentimental ‘moderns’ to be found”. BLAST went further, ridiculing the “Ginos of the Future” for their Automobilist pictures—with their careful choice of “motor omnibuses, cars, lifes, aeoplanes, etc.,”—as being too “picturesque, melodramatic and spectacular”, besides being “undigested” and (like Cubism) “naturalistic to a fault”. Futurism was, to use a later phrase of Lewis’s, a “fanatic naturalism”.

Ugo Giannattasio: Senza titolo, 1920

The ‘nightmare of the naturalistic method’
Lewis’s disparagement of Futurism as “impressionism up-to-date”, a heightened form of naturalism, echoes the criticism made by his acquaintance, T. E. Hulme, who dismissed the Futurist style as a mere “reflection” of the mechanical environment (there is no contradiction here: as the German psychologist, Theodor Lipps, observed in Ästhetik, mechanical forces are natural forces). In Hulme’s terminology—’borrowed’ from Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung—Futurism was thus an extension of the vital or ‘empathetic’ art of Western Hellenic culture and the Renaissance, a naturalistic art expressing a worldview fundamentally opposed to the geometrical or abstract aesthetics of archaic cultures (principally Egyptian, Byzantine, and Oriental, but also seen—to a less profound degree—in Nordic pre-Renaissance art, a.k.a nordische Vorrenaissancekunst).

Vital art, characterised by its organic, emotional, and fluid qualities, sprang from a “more intimate feeling towards the world”, a “happy pantheistic relationship of confidence” between man and the flux of the “phenomena of the external world.” It corresponds to (i.e., results from and expresses) a confident attitude of continuity, which Hulme believed to be the foundation of humanism, insomuch as humanism regards progress as “an inevitable constituent of reality itself”, as “independent in its extent and performance as God”. Whereas the urge towards abstraction is the outcome of a “great inner unrest” provoked in man by the transient phenomena of the outside world—operating as it were from a principle of discontinuity—the belief in continuity signifies complete confidence in the external world, an uncomplicated sense of belonging in the constant flux of nature. Tending to flourish in temperate and agreeable climes, such confidence fosters a feeling of ’empathy’ that gives rise to mimetic representation and “world-revering naturalism”: as the artist delights in recreating the soft, vital forms of existing things, he resorts to the use of perspective and natural, sensual shapes.

It is little wonder Lewis believed the seeds of the “naturalist mistakes” were to be found “precisely in Greece,” where this confidence led to a Classical style whose beauty was living and organic, into which the need for empathy—unimpeded by anxieties regarding the outer world—could freely flow. Naturalism, however, as Worringer well understood, must be clearly distinguished from mere imitation of the natural world. Naturalism is, yes, the approximation to the “organic and true to life,” but not because the artist wishes to depict a natural object in its materiality faithfully, nor because he desires to give an illusion of a living object, but because his feeling for the “beauty of organic form that is true to life” has been stirred, and he seeks to give expression to this feeling. In other words, it is the happiness of the dynamic and organically alive—rather than that of ‘truth to life’—that has striven after. For the Hellenic naturalist, as later for the Futurist, art is objectified self-enjoyment.

This principle, for Worringer and Lipps, crystallises the essence of empathetic art. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy oneself in a sensuous object distinct from oneself, to empathise oneself into it, and what the artist emphasises into it is quite generally ‘life’ (energy, striving, and accomplishing—in a word, activity). This is why Hulme reasons that naturalistic or impressionistic art necessarily partakes of the flux—in the ephemerality and disorder of the natural world. What Hulme means by this, and by consequently dubbing Futurism the “last efflorescence of Impressionism”, is encapsulated in a passage from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting:

The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism… it shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself.

…a principle visualised in works such as Balla’s Speeding Automobile, Severini’s Blue Dancer or Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Football Player. For the Futurist, everything concrete is in fact, process; everything is involved in everything else (Alfred North Whitehead called this ‘organic mechanism’). Simply put, Futurism differed from Impressionism in emphasis only: whereas Impressionists analyzed color to capture the elusive qualities of light, Futurists examined motion to capture moving forms. Akin, however, to the naturalists of Worringer’s Classical-Hellenic tradition, the Futurists did not seek merely to imitate the new nature of the dynamic machine world. Acting as nature’s amplificationists, their objective was to project the lines and forms of the organically vital, the euphony of its rhythm—in fact, its entire inward being—outward, to “furnish in every creation a theatre for the free, unimpeded activation of one’s own sense of life”—thus allowing the spectator to experience gratification through the mysterious dynamism of organic form, in which one could enjoy one’s own organism more intensely. Given Lewis’s aversion to the use of “infantile or immature life” in art and his despisal of ‘the fluid’, it is little surprise that, several months after Hulme’s lecture, BLAST declared: “We are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism).”