The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18
September 30, 2010 - January 2, 2011
"The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18" is the first exhibition devoted to this Anglo-American movement to be presented in the United States or Italy. It is also the first to attempt to recreate the three Vorticist exhibitions mounted during World War I that served to define the group's radical aesthetic for the public. An abstracted figurative style, combining machine-age forms and the energetic imagery suggested by a vortex, Vorticism emerged in London at a moment when the staid English art scene had been jolted by the advent of French Cubism and Italian Futurism. Absorbing elements from both, but also defining themselves against these foreign idioms, Vorticism was a short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that spanned the years of World War I (1914-1918).
Programs and Events
All events are free with admission and open to all, unless otherwise noted. Complete listings are here.
September 30 Exhibition Opening and Curators Conversation, 7 PM
October 15, and 16 at 7 PM, October 17 "Western Men" A surreal one-act play by Adam Sobsey and directed by Jay O'Berski.
October 29 and 30 "Vorticism: New Perpectives," a free symposium with keynote addresses by Fredric Jameson (Duke University) and Paul Edwards (Bath Spa University). For more information go to the Duke Center for European Studies.
October 31 "The Vorticists: Musical Allies," musical performance of rare British avant-garde works of the 1914-18 period by Lord Berners, John Foulds and their European colleagues Debussy and Stravinsky, 2:30 PM.
November 18 Annual Semans Lecture: Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 7 PM.
November 21 Free Family Day, noon to 4 PM.
December 2 First Thursday, gallery talk by Mark Antliff, co-curator of The Vorticists, and Scott Klein, associate professor and chairman of the English Department, Wake Forest University. Cash bar, 5:30 PM. Talk, 6 PM.
December 5 Vorticists Films
This seminal exhibition is co-curated by Mark Antliff, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition will showcase approximately 90 works (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs and related ephemera) by members of the Vorticist movement drawn from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. Vorticism will introduce visitors to such artists as Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth and other members of the Vorticist group. The group took its name from "Vortex," a term coined by the American expatriate literary great Ezra Pound in 1913, when describing the "maximum energy" he and his colleagues wished to instill among London's literary and artistic avant-garde. The Vorticist painters created compositions activated by zigzagging, diagonal forms and—in contrast to the Cubists and Futurists—more fully embraced geometric, abstract imagery, while not abandoning three-dimensional space. They harnessed the language of abstraction to convey the industrial dynamism they associated with the "vortex" of the modern city.
Among historians of modernism, Vorticism has been traditionally treated as an insular British art movement. "The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18" will overcome that myth by identifying the movement as a distinctly Anglo-American endeavor developed in 1914 as an avant-garde response to the impact of French Cubism and Italian Futurism on artists and writers in London and New York.
At the Nasher Museum, support for The Vorticists is provided by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Marilyn M. Arthur, Trent and Susan Carmichael, the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Duke University, Pepper and Donald Fluke, James and Laura Ladd, Olympia Stone and Sims Preston, and Nancy Palmer Wardropper, with assistance from the British Council.
