Colors were meant to jolt the viewer and provoke an emotional response.
——Wassily Kandinsky
The progress of social changes is brought about by reactionary groups and social reformers. The British vorticism was one of those many groups which pushed the social transformation to the limits. Found by Wyndham Lewis, the artist, writer, and polemicist in 1914, before the first world war, Vorticism was launched with the issue (of two) of the magazine Blast which contained among other material two aggressive manifestos by Lewis ‘blasting’ what he considered to be the effeteness of British art and culture and proclaiming the vorticist aesthetic: ‘The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the Present – we produce a New Living Abstraction’.
“Imagine yourself as a dreamer standing in the middle of the whirlpool, what can you see? What can you hear?” you must see the rapid change of your surroundings, the speed of the universe that allows no fixation of the look. This is the modern world that Vorticist intended to present to the viewers. As Wyndham Lewis explained, " At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated, and there at the point of concentration is the Vorticist."
Gazing upon the canvas, we experience a wave of vertigo over the presentation of immensely amorphous shapes and wild colors. We perceive what seems like a resemblance of the storm that stirs everything in turmoil. The vorticist portrayal of modernity is centered around actualizing what comes to be impossible to our human mind, like the stormy scenario, to which we fear too much to draw ourselves close. But, like Lewis himself said, we are in the very center of the whirlpool——the silence, bizarre and unusual, which enables us to see what is impossible in reality and to imagine what comes to be unthinkable in our daily life. It is the first time, in which we set our eyes on the violent storm-alike so closely that we can feel every strain of our nerves tensed under a wave of indescribable pressure. However, as we exam the picture more closely, we realize that the resemblance of the storm is a disguise for a merry-go-round machine in an amusement park. An amusement park is somewhere keeping a lot of people’s unforgettable memories. Those beautiful happy moments remind us of the utopian world we are living in. However, such celebratory moments seem too good to appear on the vorticist canvas. After all, it is at odds with the dystopian flag that reactionary vorticist holds against the tranquil world in traditional narrative. However, rather than decisively fighting against the tradition by undermining everything existing, Vorticism embraced the old machine with all of its productive and destructive possibilities. They abstracted machine-age imagery in their compositions and used clean lines and bright colors to further suggest the hard edges and shiny surfaces of the machine.
This is where we catch the image of futurism and cubism. Indeed, Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. It was, in effect, a British equivalent to futurism, regardless of doctrinal differences, and Lewis was deeply hostile to the futurists.
If we see Futurists’ decisiveness of overthrowing the old-fashioned situation is expressed employing celebrating innovation, modernity, and speed, the radical idea of vorticism, on the other hand, dismisses everything.
Pictorially, the vorticist portrayal was a style of clear forms, linear and hard-edged, using an unmodulated color that was frequently independent of any representational value and, for the most part, secondary to the drawing. It reflected the energy of modern life as manifest in machinery, factories and the docks, popular music, and dance. But it rejected the romantic-descriptive elements that characterized the futurists’ stress on speed and movement.
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), for instance, gives us a hint of the futurist perspective. Rather than grasping a fixed moment of a situation, Balla attempts to keep track of a timespan by rendering everything dynamistic. Therefore, we see a pair of rapidly walking feet with a dog trotting jovially beside. The steps are quick, and we can feel the speed through the blurring outline. Depicting a certain scenario is not the aim. But rather the scenario is secondary in comparison with the expression of movement and speed.
Differentiated from the futurist perspective, Vorticist focuses on shapes and edges valued as keys to unlock the façade of modern cities. As their apologist, the poet and critic TE Hulme, wrote: “Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.” Vorticism was to be unsentimental, objective, impersonal.
Therefore, we see Vorticist paintings appear as kaleidoscope images that present nothing but a constant change. Though the idea of change is not quintessential, the intention of revealing an unstable modern world is alluded to by the undefined shapes and colors. Gazing upon the painting, we seem to be immersed in the immensely tense ambiance that modernity has created for us. It is the rapid change that we find difficult to keep pace with. No sooner the vague image of a man’s face appears than it submerges into a cluster of amorphous shapes and forms. The nature of the Kaleidoscope image is also implicative. It not only alludes to the act of seeing but stresses the variation of how to see——the change is more about the viewer than the world. After all, the idea of the world depends on how we “see” the world.
Kaleidoscope is just one profile of the constantly changing world. The vorticist ambition of objectifying the world is amplified by a sequence of changing forms and hard-edged shapes. However, the First World War brought vorticism to an end, although in 1920 Lewis made a brief attempt to revive it with Group X. The horrors of war brought about a rejection of the avant-garde in favor of traditional art-making, known as return to order.