Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has been termed "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
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.
Bertram Richard Brooker was a Canadian abstract painter. A self-taught polymath, in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General's Award-winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive. A key part of the art community in Toronto, he is considered one of its "most gifted first responders".
Zang Tumb Tumb is a sound poem and concrete poem written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist. It appeared in excerpts in journals between 1912 and 1914, when it was published as an artist's book in Milan. It is an account of the Battle of Adrianople, which he witnessed as a reporter for L'Intransigeant. The poem uses Parole in libertà and other poetic impressions of the events of the battle, including the sounds of gunfire and explosions. The work is now seen as a seminal work of modernist art, and an enormous influence on the emerging culture of European avant-garde print.
"[The] masterpiece of Words-in-freedom and of Marinetti’s literary career was the novel Zang Tumb Tuuum... the story of the siege by the Bulgarians of Turkish Adrianople in the Balkan War, which Marinetti had witnessed as a war reporter. The dynamic rhythms and onomatopoetic possibilities that the new form offered were made even more effective through the revolutionary use of different typefaces, forms and graphic arrangements and sizes that became a distinctive part of Futurism. In Zang Tumb Tuuum; they are used to express an extraordinary range of different moods and speeds, quite apart from the noise and chaos of battle.... Audiences in London, Berlin and Rome alike were bowled over by the tongue-twisting vitality with which Marinetti declaimed Zang Tumb Tuuum. As an extended sound poem it stands as one of the monuments of experimental literature, its telegraphic barrage of nouns, colours, exclamations and directions pouring out in the screeching of trains, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and the clatter of telegraphic messages." — Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzola
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.
Frederick Etchells was an English artist and architect.
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.
Events from the year 1914 in art.
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.
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, sometimes called Dog on a Leash or Leash in Motion, is a 1912 oil painting by Italian Futurist painter Giacomo Balla. It was influenced by the artist's fascination with chronophotographic studies of animals in motion. It is considered one of his best-known works, and one of the most important works in Futurism, though it received mixed critical reviews. The painting has been in the collection of the Albright–Knox Art Gallery since 1984.
Paul George Konody was a Hungarian-born, London-based art critic and historian, who wrote for several London newspapers, as well as writing numerous books and articles on noted artists and collections, with a focus on the Renaissance. A recognized expert on the art of the Renaissance, he was lauded for his evaluation of claims of authenticity for works from that period, correctly debunking Wilhelm von Bode's assertion that a bust of Flora was sculpted by Leonardo da Vinci. During World War I, Konody became interested in the representation of war in the arts, and directed an effort to commemorate Canadian participation in that war.
Ezra Pound is a portrait of the American poet Ezra Pound, made by his friend Wyndham Lewis in 1939.
