Vorticism: The original Anglo-Futurism? Part II

 

‘Impressionistic Fuss’

The rejection of Impressionism, which the Italian painters were keen to emphasise, held little weight for Lewis: he maintained that Futurism, with its naïve enthusiasm for machinery and the ‘modern’, merely parodied Wilde and Gissing, being a “sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870”.

Giacomo Balla: Forme rumore di motocicletta, 1913

“Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery,” BLAST quips, “Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses, was futurist in this sense”. Like Hulme, Lewis saw little distinction between the naturalist aims and techniques of late 1800s Impressionism and the arbitrarily named Post-Impressionist movement, which included Divisionism as a variant and which was claimed as a crucial element of Futurist aesthetics. Regardless of its ‘anti-pastist’ intent, both Hulme and Lewis felt that Futurism differed only in degree, not in kind, from the norms that had prevailed in European art since the ‘heresy’ of the Renaissance, and shared the same defects: the same superficial and “insipid” optimism rooted in a purely illusory confidence in continuity (the “flowing lines” and “absence of linear organisation” revealed, in Lewis’s words, an “inveterate humanism”). It was against this far-reaching tradition—stretching back to the ancient Greeks, those “Gods of the Renaissance”—that Lewis believed we should turn to the Classical Orient (in the “sense of Guénon”) for reprieve.

The abstraction Hulme and Lewis sought to revive—which permeated the ancient world and was most perfectly embodied in the Guénonian Orient—was a tradition that resulted instead from an immense spiritual and primitive fear elicited in man vis-à-vis the phenomena of the external world, an instinctive feeling of alienation and dread that the rationalistic development of mankind had gradually suppressed. As Worringer states, only the civilised peoples of the East—whose more profound world-instinct resisted man’s development in a rationalistic direction, and who perceived in the material world only the shimmering veil of Maya—remained tormented by the disjointed, bewildering, arbitrary flux of life, the relativity of all that is, and “all the intellectual mastery of the world-picture” could not denude them of this worldview. Their subsequent calling, as Lewis later wrote of his own profession, was “to solidify, to make concrete, to give definition to… to postulate permanence.”

The abstract temporality of Futurism’s machine art was hardly appropriate for bringing this tradition into the twentieth century. Yet amidst the “stylistic thundercloud” of radical modernisms gathering over pre-war Europe, Hulme foresaw the emergence of an authentic modern art that truly did express this profounder worldview: a “complex geometrical art” hardening out and separating itself from the other avant-garde movements—at odds not only with “naturalist dogmas” of post-Renaissance art but also with the flux and ‘messy’ attitude of humanism: the “state of mind” that had pervaded the ‘history’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (“Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy, and Modernism in religion”). Where the Futurists—in their unyielding romanticism and blind devotion to the “Great God Flux”—counterintuitively humanised the contemporary “mechanical juggernaut” and naturalised it into an ‘organic mechanism’, the new and severer art, according to Hulme, should be strictly inorganic: its forms (like machinery) bare, clear-cut, and “austere”. Following Worringer, Hulme believed the very “idea of machinery” should completely differentiate contemporary art from the “sloppy dregs of the Renaissance”—the artist not merely re-enacting the “frenzied evolutionary” nature of the mechanical world, but reducing it to its essential geometrical forms. Unlike the uncritical modernolatry of Futurism and the ‘safe’, tasteful anaemia of Cubism’s still-lifes and assemblages, Hulme’s authentically modern art would derive instead from the “subordination of the technological to the aesthetic.”

Our Hated Geometric World

BLAST had signalled Vorticism’s readiness to answer this call, asserting that by “bowing the knee to wild Mother Nature”—whether in her traditional or mechanical garb—the artist sacrifices his creative individuality, fusing his invention with the arbitrary and often mundane forms of the perceptually shifting world. While the Futurists accepted today’s ‘nature’ wholesale (“their paean to machinery is really a worship of a Panhard racing-car”), the ideal mechanical art envisioned by Hulme would more closely align with the geometrical arts of the ancient past, both in style (adapting the “intensity” of Byzantine mosaics, with their “rigid lines” and “dead crystalline forms”) and sensibility (being an objective, absolute machine art that embodies a “disharmony” or “separation between man and nature”). Unlike the naturalist impulse towards empathy—which finds its fulfilment in the beauty of the organic—this more primitive urge towards geometric abstraction sought beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in pure geometric regularity, and more broadly in all abstract laws and necessities. For Lewis’s friend, Ezra Pound, the early paintings by Lewis and the sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska exemplified a modern art that imbibed this spirit, liberating the imagination from the overly familiar world of the organic into one of semi-abstract forms and “planes in relation”. Take, for instance, Brzeska’s marble portrait of Pound—commissioned by Pound himself—which subdues the poet’s vaguely Nordic features and ziggurat hair into simple geometric planes until he resembles an Easter Island statue.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914

The crucial move for Vorticism, in establishing its aesthetic philosophy, was to apply this juxtapositional, spatial model to ways of thinking about time. A few months before the launch of BLAST in 1914, Hulme delivered an influential lecture at the Quest Society on Modern Art, wherein he described Byzantine mosaics, the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and the figures and masks of ‘primitive’ tribal cultures as examples of artworks embodying his desired principle of discontinuity: the impermanence of the outside world, Hulme said, incited either dread or disgust in the archaic artist, prompting him to seek refuge in abstraction, in perfection and rigidity, in stable monumental shapes. In contrast to naturalism’s humanistic confidence in change, these abstract works wrested the object out of its natural context, out of the flux and contingency of the organic world, and strove to impose upon it the stamp of eternalness. As Lewis was commended in Hulme’s lecture as an exemplary practitioner of this new “constructive geometrical art”, there is good reason to believe that he was aware of it and was influenced by it in departing from Futurism and establishing the angular, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist style of Vorticism.

The Great English Vortex

The dictionary defines a vortex as a whirling mass of water or air, and one might presume, from subsequent references to lines of flow, spirals, curves, and rings, that a movement calling themselves Vorticists would have produced an art that was certainly curvilineal and possibly soft-edged, evoking the fluidity and rotation characteristic of whirlpools and whirlwinds. Yet Vorticism—in contrast to the swirling patterns and compositional turbulence of Futurism—adhered to a rigidly geometrical, sharply delineated aesthetic of “diagonals, zig-zags and verticals.” Rejecting Futurism’s machine-idolatry and its proto-accelerationist exaltation of speed and change, the Vorticists, as Marshall McLuhan observed, instead sought to “arrest the flux of existence” so that the observer could be “united with that which is permanent.” As opposed to the “sentimental Future” as it was to the “sacripant Past,” Vorticist art “plunges to the heart of the Present” to create an aesthetic concretisation of time that momentarily disrupts the “insistent, hypnotic” rhythm of the mechanical world around us.

Declaring themselves not “the Slave[s] of Commotion but its Master[s]”, the Vorticists thus harnessed the tension between the formalism (and “static monumentality”) of Cubism and the “kinetic dynamics” of Futurism, bringing to the foreground the stillness that resides at the heart of all movement—hence the foundational metaphor of the vortex, a “circulation with a still centre.” Vorticism was, in other words, “a dynamic formism”, and the Vorticist at his “maximum point of energy when stillest.” In place of Futurism’s fetishisation of the new “beauty of speed,” la bellezza della velocità—which had the effect, in Futurist canvases by Balla, Severini, and Boccioni, of disrupting Lewis’s aesthetic preference for the Oriental rigidity of outline with blurred and multiple images—the Vorticists offered a controlled energy. Their machine aesthetic was a necessary vertebration of Marinetti’s “impressionism and sensationalism”, tempering Futurist melodramatics with Cubist sobriety, “Italian movement” with “French monumentality.” Where Futurist paintings were “swarming, exploding, or burgeoning with life,” Vorticist art was “electric with a more mastered, vivid vitality.”

Wyndham Lewis: The Dancers, 1912.

For Lewis, the vortex could thus be defined as a “great silent place” at the “heart of the whirlpool” where “all the energy is concentrated.” It was not a flux but a “dynamic, moving image” related to time but also “containing a stable point, the spatial element from which its “energy spirals originate.” But where Lewis’s vision of the vortex was centrifugal, the Futurist’s was centripetal, with “force-lines” that “encircle and involve the spectator so that he will […] be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.” Positioning the spectator at the ‘centre of the picture’, making him ‘live’ in that convergence of flux, in a participative role, was a recurrent theme in Futurist theory: “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing,” states the Manifesto tecnico, “we would at any price re-enter into life.”

This invitation to merge with the new live world around us epitomised, in Lewis’s view, the “arch mistake” of modern aesthetic philosophy—namely, the tendency to fuse things which would otherwise be discriminated—and stood in direct contrast to the Vorticist view of art as an “arrest and detachment” of the “great mechanism of the world.” The Futurists’ desire to ‘replunge’ into the “waves of the vital flux,” to “become the flux,” meant trading our substantial self for a series of ‘selves’ created anew with every ‘event’; we acclimatise ourselves to regard our personalities as the “continuous transition of one physical event into another.” And as the substantial self vanishes, so too does the world: the “proposed transfer” from the “beautiful objective, material world of common-sense” to the ‘organic’ world of “chronological mentalism” entails losing not only the “clearness of outline” of our individuality but also the “clearness of outline, the static beauty” of the world as that individuality commonly apprehends it. What archaic ages perceived as a chaotic universe—a flux and disorder threatening man’s distinctiveness—appeared to the empathetic artist as solid and familiar, a spiritual dynamism reflecting his optimistic sense of self and progress; the blasé confidence (or “suicidal faith”) that Time is ‘reality.’

Futurism and the Time-Cult

When Hulme refers to Futurism as the “deification” of the flux, he is recognising this same anthropomorphic self-confidence; for him, Futurism is an empathetic art product (indeed, by drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture, Futurist art replicates the effect achieved when the naturalist artist ’empathises’ himself into the outer world: freed from anxiety and spiritual fear, the external world begins to live, receiving all its life from man, who now anthropomorphises its inner essence, its inner dynamism). Hulme’s phrase thus implicitly yokes Futurism—usually associated with Italian fascism—to the ‘insipid’ optimism of his and Lewis’s contemporaries like Wells, Bennett, and Shaw, all of whom had as their central subject this most widely accepted of modern beliefs: the idea of progress. Modern man, as Lewis’s acquaintance, Stephen Spender, wrote, believes in progress as an objective reality existing outside himself, convinced that however “disappointing” man is, there is “no doubt” that machines improve and that the failure of individuals is contrasted with, if not “balanced by”, immense progress in the objective, mechanistic world.

Like Hulme, Lewis regarded the Futurist preoccupation with speed and change as indicative of a broader philosophical zeitgeist, one nurtured by Whitehead and particularly by Lewis’s bête noire, Henri Bergson. Bergson challenged the notion of ‘abstract’ clock-time with his concept of ‘real duration’ or durée réelle: the ‘lived-time’ of our inner subjective experience, which cannot be grasped by the spatialising, mechanising intellect but rather through the immediate faculty of intuition. By asserting the metaphysical and psychological primacy of la durée—and conversely, the illusory nature of everything that seemed stable and static—Bergson effectively inverted the traditionalist equivalence of truth with eternal perdurance. Lewis lamented the influence of Bergsonism, seeing it as the “great organiser of disintegration” in contemporary art and philosophy, both of which focussed on notions of process, change and becoming, as reflected in subjective experience, rather than on the ideas of the outwardly apparent permanence of the visual world and its relation of that visual world to eternal being.

Bergson’s vision of universal becoming—his new ‘organic’ philosophy, with its appeal to immediate experience, its anti-intellectualism, its demonisation of all spatial, external, objective, “physical” characteristics at the expense of temporal “mental” ones, its penchant for, in Samuel Alexander’s phrase, “taking time seriously”—was against all Lewis stood for as an artist: the common-sense visual realm of static, exactly outlined, and harmoniously proportioned things, apprehended, painted, and constructed by someone possessing his own stable self (consider, Lewis says, an immobile castle reflected in a glassy river—this is the perfect illustration of our “static dream”). Vorticism thus presented the counter-revolutionary case against the ‘revolution’ of Bergsonian time, which epitomised everything Lewis considered degenerate in art: flux, change, romanticism, the crowd, and the unconscious, whereas ‘geometric’ space represented all that he believed desirable: stability, permanency, classicism, the individual, and consciousness.

In Lewis’s most important critical volume, 1927’s Time and Western Man, he launched an all-out attack on various kinds of art and literature spellbound by this time-spirit, by philosophies of becoming, flux, or la durée. Lewis assumes an interconnection of the time-doctrines of Bergson, Alexander and Whitehead with the incessant movement of Futurism, the historiographies of Spengler, the ‘frenzied’ will-to-power attitudes of Marinetti, Sorel and Nietzsche, and the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Proust, Stein, and Joyce. From this lengthy list of animadversions, Lewis singles out Ulysses for its “obsessional application” of the naturalistic method—associated, as in Futurism, with the “exacerbated time-sense,” and later characterised the post-Joycean interior monologue as a “tumultuous stream of evocative, spell-bearing vocables, launched at your head—or poured into your Unconscious. … It may be an auriferous mud, but it must remain mud—not a clear but a murky picture.” For Lewis, these literary and visual works alike were conspiring to redefine “reality” as wholly temporal, dissolving both the individual personality (subject) and the external world (object) into “streams of… breathless transformations” none of which possessed any more reality than any other. Left unopposed, the modernist disciples of Bergson’s ‘religion of impermanence’ would return us to that ‘feverish chaos’ of pure sensation, where identities dissolve, and there is no “coolness of separation between you and me or between either of us or the senses that compose the empirical world.” In Samuel Butler’s words, Man becomes a quicksand on which “no equilibrium of habit and civilisation could be established.”

Up Life! Down Art!

For Lewis, Bergsonism in the arts thus represented a distortion of the natural order, a “rendering back” to LIFE—that “feverish chaos”—all that the mind had taken from her to build into forms and concepts (a symbolic reversal of the endeavours of the ancient Egyptians in raising from the swamp of papyrus the solid islands they later conventionalised into pyramids). He characterises Bergson as the “philosopher of Impressionism,” crediting his “gospel of fluidity and illiquation” for this ‘savage’ turn of the European intellectual world towards ‘LIFE,’ of which Marinetti’s Nietzsche-inspired “war-talk, sententious elevation, and much besides” was also a part. Indeed, the Futurist Manifesto—faced with Italy’s “flaccid inertia”—sought resolution in speed, in “energy” and “fearlessness”, with nerves that “demand war” and lust for “danger,” and proudly exalted “aggressive action, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch”.

Luigi Russolo: La Rivolta, 1911

Russolo’s The Revolt (1911) transposes this declaration onto the canvas, employing energetic brushstrokes, triangular wedges, and a vibrant colour palette to capture the “emotive force” of revolutionary violence and “forcibly oblige the spectator” to be at the “centre of the painting”, to relive the fervour of the advancing mob. This urgent call for supplementary activity on the part of the spectator—the appeal to subjective experience—stood in direct contradiction to the ancient world’s need for abstraction. In the urge to abstraction, the intensity of the self-alienative impulse predominates: ‘LIFE,’ for the archaic artist as for Lewis, was felt to be a disturbance of aesthetic enjoyment.

The invocation to engage with the uncivilised emotions of the masses in Russolo’s canvas (and in Boccioni’s The Rising City) hence represented, for Lewis, an “identification with the crowd” and a “huge hypocrisy”—a failure to grasp the function of art as a phenomenon of separation and as the traditional “enemy of life.” He opposed Futurism’s elevation of intuition over intellect, subjectivism over objectivism, and valourisation of action-for-its-own sake (“truth has no place in action”), deeming it a ‘false-revolutionary’ approach that was less a countermovement than a surrender to the European zeitgeist. This evaluation is illustrated in the stick figures in The Crowd, whose French and Communist flags symbolise the various doctrinaire revolutionary ideologies of modernity, but whose ‘revolt’ Lewis depicts not as a vitalistic surge (as in Russolo’s painting), but as a mass of busy-bodying automatons “strut[ting] and pant[ing] in insect packs”, indistinguishable from one another and from the mechanical metropolis that ‘enframes’ them.

Wyndham Lewis: The Crowd, 1914-15

Revolution was too intimately associated with mechanistic ‘progress’, a submission to Hegel’s advancing logic of the dialectic and to its counterpart, the historical determinism and biological fatalism of Spengler’s ‘world-as history’” (i.e., ‘world-as-time’), which, according to Lewis, “so excellently fits in” with the “fatalist and evolutionist requirements” of orthodox ‘revolutionary’ thought begot by the time-mind. Vorticism’s jagged forms, sharply delimited by straight lines or geometric arcs, thus betokened a classical search for control and rationality in contrast to the fluid and imprecise approach of Futurism, which Lewis considered a continuation of the modernist “disorder” of Nineteenth Century ‘romantic’, ‘revolutionary’, European thought.

‘Wild, romantic, Rousseauesque’

Lewis’s denigration of Futurism as ‘romantic’ stems from his Hulmean interpretation of Romanticism not as a period but as a philosophical approach: Romanticism meant temporality and the myriad social ills Lewis associated with it: everything “romantically ‘dark’, vague, ‘mysterious’, stormy, uncertain”. Classicism, conversely, meant everything nobly defined and exact (the Hellenic, for Lewis, held no monopoly on the ‘classical’). Futurism was thus ‘Romantic’ for fetishising flux, speed, and dynamic action, while Vorticism was ‘Classical’ in emphasising detachment and the hard-edged forms of space. Romanticism possessed a similarly sweeping and negative connotation in Hulme’s thought: it represented nothing less than the artistic expression of the humanistic conception of man that had prevailed since the Renaissance (evolving, as it were, in a straight line from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man to Rousseau). We have already noted that Hulme perceived Western humanism—the “slush in which we have the misfortune to live”—as intellectually insipid compared to the stark, “uncompromising bleakness” of Indian philosophy, just as he regarded Western naturalism as decadent and “anaemic” next to the angular hardness and bareness of Egyptian and African art. His principal contribution to modern British art, however, lay in linking these static Oriental and primitive worldviews with the emerging preference for the austere, hard, clean and ‘bare’ aesthetics evident in the works of certain contemporary British artists, thus endowing the new mechanical art with a vision of its traditions and its place in history. “Austerity” and “bareness” were the traits Hulme applauded in the work of Lewis and Jacob Epstein, and these, he stressed, were the “exact opposite” of Futurism (a descendant, instead, of the ‘Occidental’ romantic tradition).

Rebels of the North

By presenting the austere geometric works of the Rebel Art Centre painters—including his own—as a distinctly Anglo-Saxon or ‘Northern’ artistic expression, Lewis was thus able to further distinguish Vorticism from Futurism. The English were the “inventors of this bareness and hardness”, he proclaimed in BLAST, “and should be the great enemies of Romance.” After all, the English could accept the machine without the Futurist’s “propagandist fuss”:

England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about. While Italy was still a Borgia-haunted swamp of intrigue, England was buckling on the brilliant and electric armour of the modern world and sending out her inventions and new spirit across Europe and America.

Unlike all the ‘hullo-bulloo’ of Marinetteism about motor cars “more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace”, ‘the art for these climates,’ the Vorticists asserted, must be a “northern flower.”

Lewis follows Worringer in contrasting the lively naturalism and romanticism of early Southern European art with the Gothic formalism that flourished in the North, whose people had no “clear blue sky” arching over them, no serene climate, and no “luxuriant vegetation” to induce in their souls a “world-revering pantheism.” Faced with a “harsh and unyielding” nature, Northern man experienced not only the resistance of the environment but also his isolation within it, and so confronted the phenomena and flux of the outer world with a sense of “disquiet and distrust.” For Lewis, the “natural magic” of Western poetry derived its “peculiar” and penetrating quality from these “intense relations” of the Western Mind to the “alien” physical world of “nature.” He therefore urged his fellow artists to “ONCE MORE WEAR THE ERMINE OF THE NORTH” and even advocated for the return of “necessary blizzards” to reawaken that primitive sense of deep dread before nature—the disharmonious état d’âme that first compelled Northern man towards rigid lines and inert crystalline forms, rather than to the naturalistic and organic forms of the South.

That Vorticism remains a less influential movement than Futurism—being little more today than employment for art historians—doubtless speaks to our ongoing fetishisation of the south, of the sun, of “bright Latin violence and directness”—la gaya Scienza. For Vorticism, unfashionably, typified Worringer’s observation that Northern art aims to ‘de-organicise’ the organic, to translate the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. As with the Classical-Orient cultures Lewis praised for emphasising the hard-edged forms of space and the “immediate and sensuous… the ‘spatial’”, the art of the Celto-Germanic North strove to suppress every element of the organic by approximating it to a pure linear regularity. The happiness they sought from art did not lie in projecting or empathising themselves into objects of the outer world, but rather in wresting the object out of the external world, out of the unending flux of being—purifying it of its dependence on life and everything temporal or arbitrary—and elevating it into the realm of the necessary; in a word, to eternalise it. This, Lewis asserts, is the heritage being repudiated in the present ‘time’ modes—a repudiation that shows no sign of abating today.

Conclusion

Vorticism’s defence of its Northern heritage can be seen as a proclamation of Lewis’s essentialism—his counter-propagandistic belief in ‘essence’ as opposed to ‘being’ and ‘becoming’—an essentialism expressed in Time and Western Man’s preference for Parmenides, who emphasised the unchanging and eternal nature of reality, over Heraclitus, the “weeping philosopher”, who proposed that there is “nothing but dissolution and vanishing away, so that the river into which you step is never twice the same river, but always a different one.” It was this Heraclitean view of energy and force that the Futurists extolled, but for the Vorticists, as for Lewis’s Tarr, “Art is identical with the idea of permanence… Anything living, quick and changing is bad art always”. The artistic imagination, like the intellectual vision, should be devoted not to energy but to the Apollonian search for form: “to crystallise that which (otherwise) flows away, to concentrate the diffuse, to turn to ice that which is liquid and mercurial.”

But surely, as Northrop Frye protests, art is energy incorporated in form—the energy rhythm, the form plasticity. Overemphasis on one leads to a surging Heraclitean chaos; overemphasis on the other to a frozen Parmenidean one. Yet both these, as Frye suggests, are essentially the same thing: the root of evil in art lies in the “unfortunate tendency toward the abstract antithesis,” toward the composition of cheap epigrams which “minor critics revel in” and serious artists avoid.

Lewis, of course, was alive to this charge, as evidenced by a series of late-career ‘sea images’, nudes and bathers, painted in the mixed idiom of “pure-abstraction-and-stylized-nature” (he even pronounced the death of purely abstract art in 1939 and declared himself a “super-naturalist”). Yet this collection of brilliant watercolours, with their cloudy, watery spaces and huge, floating marine shapes—regarded by Walter Michel as the “imaginative and gayest” of Lewis’s career and his most ‘human art’ to date—only makes plain what Lewis had always considered to be the true relation between the artist and nature. He held the traditional view of imitation as working in the way nature works, with all the “beauty of accident”, but without the “certain futility that accident implies,” so that art becomes, in a sense, another nature.

Wyndham Lewis: Bathers, 1942

It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find in the sketches for these Etty-inspired nudes a stark Vorticist geometry still underlying Lewis’s newly flowing lines. Even as a super-naturalist, Lewis never revoked Tarr‘s dictum that “Deadness is the first condition of art,” a deadness based upon “the absence of soul, in the human sentimental sense”—this was why Vorticism first invoked the ‘abstraction’ of all the Pharaohs and Buddhas, our world of “matter,” against the “Einsteinian, Bergsonian or Alexandrine world of Time and “restless” interpenetration.” But Lewis’s paradisal 1940s paintings, these semi-abstract fantasies of “worlds moving round together in a chaotic corner of creation”, reveal that the Vorticist view of art was never a cold or mechanistic rationalism, as Frye’s critique implies. Art was the product, yes, of the “purest consciousness”, of the open eye, the open senses: the conduits to the constructing, shaping mind. But the producing, the actual act of creation—that, Lewis always believed, was strictly the ‘work of a visionary’:

… Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work, an entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids.

But if art is a “spell, a talisman, an incantation”, Lewis nevertheless insisted it was strictly a civilised substitute for magic, a distinction he makes explicit:

A great artist falls into a trance of sorts when he creates, about that there is little doubt. [Yet while] the act of artistic creation is a trance or dream-state, [it is] very different from that experienced by the entranced medium. A world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition is built up out of this susceptible condition in the case of the greatest art.

A different matter, then, from any creative automatism or from the blind art of flux, with its vitalist outpourings of the “hot, immediate egoism of sensational life” and its “surging ecstatic, featureless chaos” which is “being set up as an ideal, in place of the noble exactitude and harmonious proportion of the European scientific ideal.” It was this severer conception of great art that Vorticism employed to construct its nationalist avant-garde programme, making it more than just a parochial attempt to emulate Futurism. As BLAST asserts, what is actual and vital for the South is “ineffectual and unactual” in the North. This is why Vorticism—and not its continental counterpart—provides the most congruent aesthetic philosophy for new British art, and for contemporary Anglo-Saxon movements seeking, in a high modernist spirit, to “fuse national tradition with a futuristic drive for rapid technological progress.”

Perhaps it is not necessary to stress the distinction: as Lewis himself admitted, ‘Futurist,’ in England, signifies nothing more than a painter concerning himself with the renovation of art, of capturing futurity, or rebelling against the domination of the Past. Nevertheless, Vorticism—with its “bitter Northern rhetoric of humour”—remains not only the original but the true ‘Anglo-Futurism’. After all, it needs no prefix.