A Practicological Modernism
E-Book, Englisch, Band 150, 328 Seiten
Reihe: Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten (SAA)
ISBN: 978-3-381-10853-4
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modernism as an Ethos
1. "Violent Structure of Adolescent Clearness": Wyndham Lewis and the Art-Punk of Wire
2. The Demonology of Progress: From Un-Radical Modernism to Non-Moral Satire
3. An "Antynomy of Opposite Principles": Englishness and the Practicological Approach in the Historiographies of British Art and Pop
4. How to Survive in an Artless World: From Wyndham Lewis's Machine-Personae to David Bowie's Artist-as-Artificer.
5. Personality as Surface
Conclusion: The Moronic Inferno of Modernity
Bibliography
Illustration
Illustration Credits
I “Violent Structure of Adolescent Clearness”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism and the Art-Punk of Wire
In the international canon of the modern art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, those modern painters and sculptors based in the United Kingdom play a marginal role at best. Visiting the major art museums around the globe, one is hard pressed to find sizable collections of, for example, the works of Walter Sickert, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Vanessa Bell, or Duncan Grant. As a matter of fact, I would wager that most of these names, in contrast to the big, global names in modern art, will not ring a bell with art-interested people who do not harbor a specific interest in British modern art of the high modernist period. According to the collection database of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, surely one of the standard bearers of the international canon of modern art, the number of works collected of the individual artists above are each in the single digits. Also, they are mostly sketches, drawings, or watercolors and only rarely an oil painting (the exception being Sickert, of which the MoMA possesses around thirty drawings and two oil paintings). At the time of writing, none of these works are on view in the museum’s exhibition space. As a matter of fact, most of the artworks and objects from that period remain in museums and private collections within the United Kingdom. Yet even there, one usually has to selectively go to the right places to see any British modernist art on display. Notably, the United Kingdom’s leading modern art museum, the Tate Modern in London, restricts itself, with a few sporadic exceptions, to the major continental schools and isms from that period: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism etc. One is instead advised to go to the Tate Britain with its exclusive focus on British art to see one or the other of Wyndham Lewis’s major oil paintings on display. At the time of writing, the Tate Britain is displaying his Vorticist composition Workshop (Fig. 2), painted around 1914-15, and his portrait of Edith Sitwell (Fig. 3), begun in 1923 but only finished in 1935; a few years earlier, the museum had his major painting The Crowd (Fig. 4) on view instead, which he had painted around 1914-15 as well. Although it is a very clichéd statement to make, British modern art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seems to have been and continues to be a largely insular affair. There have been several efforts to try and explain why early twentieth-century British art did not play a significant role in the emergence of international modern art. One of the earliest examples is Nikolaus Pevsners still eminently readable The Englishness of English Art from 1956, but other art historians such as Werner Busch have attempted to address the question in more recent times as well. I will go into more detail about these texts in the third chapter. For the moment, it suffices to look at a 1987 exhibition review. In January of that year, the German newspaper Die Zeit published a review for the London exhibition British Art in the Twentieth Century: The Modern Movement, curated by the Royal Academy of the Arts. The exhibition was presented as a sequel to the Academy’s 1985 exhibition German Art in the Twentieth Century; it is thus no surprise that the German art critic begins with a comparison of the two exhibitions. What is irritating, however, is the barely concealed condescending tone that permeates the entire review. An unfavorable comparison between the vivid colorscapes of the German Die Brücke artists to the comparatively “moderate” late takes on Impressionism of the Camden Town Group and the equally belated take on Cézanne by the painters of the Bloomsbury Group leads her to the overall diagnosis that the “English sense for abstraction, for the whole body of thought from Malevich to Mondrian and Kandinsky, was rather underdeveloped” (Kipphoff). It is only the Vorticist movement that is recognized as a proper “explosion of vitality and dynamism.” Nevertheless, it is, ultimately dismissed as well as a “friendly, anecdotal sideshow of Italian Futurism”. The fundamental deficit of British art, thus the quintessential claim of the review, is its essential moderateness. This rather patronizing Continental European perspective of British modern art seems not to have changed significantly during the last twenty years. In 2014, the Kunstbibliothek Berlin presented a two-part exhibition entitled Avantgarde!, the first focusing on the avant-garde in the poster and advertising arts between 1890 and 1914, the second on manifestos and other publications by avant-garde movements between 1909 and 1918. If a visitor had any doubts as to whether the Vorticists were still regarded as also-rans in the established historiography of modern art, they were quickly laid to rest in the halls of the exhibition. Copies of Blast 1, the first issue Vorticist movement’s literary magazine, which was edited by Lewis and of which only two issues were published in 1914 and 1915, were conspicuously placed in one of the smallest display cases in a far away corner of the exhibition hall. The overall sense of this placement was that neither had the curators a proper idea how to integrate the Vorticist manifesto printed in Blast 1 into their overall presentation, nor did they give much thought to it in the first place. One is tempted to grudgingly concede that they at least had the courtesy to even include this “friendly, anecdotal sideshow” among the big players on the field. There are, of course, substantial reasons for this perhaps neglected treatment of Vorticism and British modern art in general. If one adheres to the historiography of modern art as one of ever progressing towards a higher degree of abstraction, then the dismissal of the British contribution to modern art as being both too late and too moderate is only logical. Furthermore, with regard to the Vorticist movement, history intervened with the First World War breaking out just one month after the publication of their founding manifesto in Blast 1. By 1916, several of its signatories and associated artists had enlisted into the British armed services; sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had already died in the trenches a year earlier. By 1917, Wyndham Lewis had gone as well, as he later succinctly put it in the title of his 1937 autobiography, from blasting to bombardiering as an artillery officer on the Western Front. Meanwhile, Jacob Epstein, shaken by the realities of industrialized warfare, decided, in 1916, to mutilate his Rock Drill (Fig. 5), one of key sculptural works of Vorticism, into a far less imposing Torso in Metal (Fig. 6). The short-lived and local nature of the Vorticist movement thus meant that the number of existing (and surviving) artworks created under its banner remained fairly small. It is perhaps emblematic for these circumstances that the Tate Britain’s 2011 retrospective exhibition of Vorticism had to resort to presenting a 1973-4 reconstruction of Epstein’s Rock Drill as its initial showpiece (Fig. 7). This was doubtlessly the correct choice considering that, even as a replica, it stands as one of the most immediately striking and impressive Vorticist artworks. However, the presence of a replica as a key piece in the exhibition also underlined the precarious status of Vorticism within the larger historiographical canon of modern art. Continental European interest in British modern art of the early twentieth century has thus been very limited. Apart from the aforementioned 1986 exhibition, the only other notable exhibition entitled Blast: Vortizismus – die erste Avantgarde in England, 1914-1918 (Blast: Vorticism – The First Avantgarde in England, 1914-1918) was presented ten years later in Hannover and Munich. There also exists one published dissertation on Vorticism from 1986, Suzanne Kappeler’s Der Vortizismus: eine englische Avantgarde zwischen 1913 und...
