Books, Arts & Manners: Blasts from the Past

The recent exhibition of graphic art by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) at the Washburn Gallery in New York City may serve to remind us that the artist who complained of neglect and even suppression had to wait nearly thirty years after his cremation for a one-man show of modest size in “the art capital of the world.” The exhibition may also serve to remind us that much of the written work of Wyndham Lewis is available now too, assembled by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara.

Perhaps the best known of Lewis’s work from the period before the First World War is the Vorticist review BLAST (1914), which rattled teacups from Kensington to Chicago. The extravagant typographical swagger and paradoxical aggressions of the early Lewis have been reproduced for us in facsimile, so that we can hold in our hand not only his spasmodic punch-ups of residual Victorianism, but also poems by Ezra Pound, “The Saddest Story” by Ford Madox Hueffer (which would become The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), and “Indissoluble Matrimony” by the young feminist Rebecca West. Vorticist manifestos and artwork by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, and others, as well as Lewis’s abstract play Enemy of the Stars, combine to make this one of the most cited—though until now seldom beheld—avant-garde reviews of this century. BLAST 2, the “war number” of 1915, also published in facsimile by Black Sparrow, was and is a thinner volume cramped by the war that would snuff out Lewis’s notorious Vorticist campaign, that unique English art movement. Again we find poems by Pound, including “Ancient Music,” and the first appearance of T. S. Eliot’s famous “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” We find an image of Gaudier-Brzeska’s hieratic head of Ezra Pound and an obituary for that sculptor,”Mort pour la patrie.” The reader who studies modernism would not miss the chance to possess such worthy replicas of two echoing BLASTs.

JT

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J. O. Tate

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The recent exhibition of graphic art by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) at the Washburn Gallery in New York City may serve to remind us that the artist who complained of neglect and even suppression had to wait nearly thirty years after his cremation for a one-man show of modest size in “the art capital of the world.” The exhibition may also serve to remind us that much of the written work of Wyndham Lewis is available now too, assembled by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara.

Perhaps the best known of Lewis’s work from the period before the First World War is the Vorticist review BLAST (1914), which rattled teacups from Kensington to Chicago. The extravagant typographical swagger and paradoxical aggressions of the early Lewis have been reproduced for us in facsimile, so that we can hold in our hand not only his spasmodic punch-ups of residual Victorianism, but also poems by Ezra Pound, “The Saddest Story” by Ford Madox Hueffer (which would become The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), and “Indissoluble Matrimony” by the young feminist Rebecca West. Vorticist manifestos and artwork by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, and others, as well as Lewis’s abstract play Enemy of the Stars, combine to make this one of the most cited—though until now seldom beheld—avant-garde reviews of this century. BLAST 2, the “war number” of 1915, also published in facsimile by Black Sparrow, was and is a thinner volume cramped by the war that would snuff out Lewis’s notorious Vorticist campaign, that unique English art movement. Again we find poems by Pound, including “Ancient Music,” and the first appearance of T. S. Eliot’s famous “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” We find an image of Gaudier-Brzeska’s hieratic head of Ezra Pound and an obituary for that sculptor,”Mort pour la patrie.” The reader who studies modernism would not miss the chance to possess such worthy replicas of two echoing BLASTs.