Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos.
Percy Wyndham Lewis was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.
Vorticism was a London-based modernist art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. The movement was partially inspired by Cubism and was introduced to the public by means of the publication of the Vorticist manifesto in Blast magazine. Familiar forms of representational art were rejected in favour of a geometric style that tended towards a hard-edged abstraction. Lewis proved unable to harness the talents of his disparate group of avant-garde artists; however, for a brief period Vorticism proved to be an exciting intervention and an artistic riposte to Marinetti's Futurism and the Post-Impressionism of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops.
David Garshen Bomberg was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French artist and sculptor who developed a rough-hewn, primitive style of direct carving.
Blast was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. Two editions were published: the first on 2 July 1914 and featured a bright pink cover, referred to by Ezra Pound as the "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus"; and the second a year later on 15 July 1915. Both editions were written primarily by Wyndham Lewis. The magazine is emblematic of the modern art movement in England, and recognised as a seminal text of pre-war 20th-century modernism. The magazine originally cost 2/6.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson, and was also known as Richard.
William Patrick Roberts was a British artist.
Dorothy Shakespear was an English artist. She was the daughter of novelist Olivia Shakespear and the wife of American poet Ezra Pound. One of a small number of women vorticist painters, her art work was published in BLAST, the short-lived but influential literary magazine.
Edward Alexander Wadsworth was a British artist initially associated with the Vorticism movement. In the First World War he was part of a team involved in the transfer of dazzle camouflage designs to ships for the Royal Navy. After the war his maritime landscapes and still-life compositions using tempera were infused with a surrealistic mood - although he never exhibited with the British surrealists. In the early thirties and in the early forties his work was mainly abstract. He made a significant contribution to the development of modern art in Britain in the inter-war years.
Jessica Stewart Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator. Dismorr participated in almost all of the avant-garde groups active in London between 1912 and 1937 and was one of the few English painters of the 1930s to work in a completely abstract manner. She was one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement and also exhibited with the Allied Artists Association, the Seven and Five Society and the London Group. She was the only female contributor to Group X and displayed abstract works at the 1937 Artists' International Association exhibition. Poems and illustrations by Dismorr appeared in several avant-garde publications including Blast, Rhythm and an edition of Axis.
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Events from the year 1914 in art.
Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. As an artist he is best known for his portraits, flower paintings and landscapes.
Russian Ballet is an artist's book by the English artist David Bomberg published in 1919. The work describes the impact of seeing a performance of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and is based on a series of drawings Bomberg had done around 1914, while associated with the Vorticist group of avant-garde artists in London. Centred on Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the movement flourished briefly from 1914–1915, before being dispersed by the impact of the First World War. The only surviving example of a vorticist artist's book, the work can be seen as a parody of Marinetti's seminal futurist book Zang Tumb Tumb, using similar language to the Italian's work glorifying war, but instead praising the impact of watching the decidedly less macho Ballets Russes in full flow.
Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving ... that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own. His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting. —Richard Cork
Kate Elizabeth Lechmere was a British painter who with Wyndham Lewis was the co-founder of the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. As far as is known, none of Lechmere's paintings have survived. She served as a nurse in England during the First World War and had a three-year relationship with the poet and critic T.E. Hulme before he was killed. After the war she became a successful milliner.
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 is a 1961–1962 painting by the English artist William Roberts. It depicts the Vorticist group gathered at a French restaurant in London.
Guide to Kulchur is a non-fiction book by the American poet Ezra Pound. Published in London in July 1938 by Faber & Faber, the book examines 2,500 years of cultural history, beginning with the Analects of Confucius. The first chapter was published in Milan in June 1937 as a pamphlet, Confucius/Digest of the Analects, by Giovanni Scheiwiller.
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin was an Indian painter and artist who is known as one of the founders of modern Indian painting. One of the first Indians to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, he rejected his western academic training to paint in a distinctly Indian style, inspired by traditional Rajasthani paintings and Mughal miniatures. He married Atiya Begum, a pioneering Muslim intellectual and feminist with whom he also collaborated creatively. Globally acclaimed by the 1920s, his most significant work was the frescoes he did on the Imperial Secretariat in New Delhi towards the end of the 1920s. Following the Partition of India, he emigrated to Pakistan with his wife where he died in poverty in Karachi in 1964.
Edith Sitwell is a portrait of the British poet and critic Edith Sitwell made by Wyndham Lewis. It was begun in 1923 and abandoned until 1935 when it was finished. It is in the collection of the Tate institution.
