William Roberts (painter) - The 'Vortex Pamphlets' and Other Publications

The 'Vortex Pamphlets' and Other Publications

In 1956 the Tate Gallery held an exhibition entitled Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, with 150 works by Lewis and a small selection by other artists to give 'an indication of the effect of his immediate impact upon his contemporaries'. Roberts was offended that the catalogue ‘would lead the uninitiated to suppose that the artists designated as "Other Vorticists" are in some way subservient to Lewis', and published a series of 'Vortex Pamphlets' in which he railed against the exhibition, the catalogue, the press coverage and the account of his own career contained in Modern English Painters by the Tate's director, Sir John Rothenstein, which appeared at about the same time. Targets of earlier visual satires had included Walter Sickert and Roger Fry. To publicise his own work he also published Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work 1913–1920 (London, 1957), the first of a series of collections of reproductions of his paintings, with somewhat polemical prefaces.