Blast (magazine) - Background

Background

When the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti visited London in 1910, as part of a series of well-publicised lectures aimed at galvanizing support across Europe for the new Italian avant-garde, his presentation at the Lyceum Club, in which he addressed his audience as "victims of .... traditionalism and its medieval trappings," electrified the assembled avant-garde. Within two years, an exhibition of futurist art at the Sackville Gallery, London, brought futurism squarely into the popular imagination, and the press began to use the term to refer to any forward-looking trends in modern art.

Initially galvanized by Marinetti's verve, Wyndham Lewis—like many other members of the London avant-garde—had become increasingly irritated by the Italian's arrogance. The publication of the English Futurist manifesto Vital English Art, in June 1914 edition of The Observer, co-written by Marinetti and the "last remaining English Futurist" C. R. W. Nevinson, Lewis found his name, among others, had been added as a signatory at the end of the article without permission, in an attempt to assimilate the English avant-garde for Marinetti's own ends. On 12 June, during recitations of this manifesto and a performance by Marinetti of his poem The Battle of Adrianople, with Nevinson accompanying on drums, Lewis, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and five others roundly interrupted the performance with jeering and shouting. Wyndham Lewis wrote a few days later, "England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about".

The final riposte came with the publication of Blast (later known as Blast 1), written and illustrated by a group of artists assembled by Lewis from "a determined band of miscellaneous anti-futurists". The name Vorticism was coined by the poet Ezra Pound, a close friend of Lewis and the group's main publicist. Writing to James Joyce in April 1914, Pound described the magazine in ambiguous terms: "Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly .... I cant tell, it is mostly a painters' magazine with me to do the poems". By July, the magazine had a name, a movement to support, and a typographic style, and it had forged a distinctly English identity, confident enough to praise Kandinsky, question Picasso, and openly mock Marinetti.