 Part 8 of Blast number 1, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Vortices and Notes by Wyndham Lewis. Life is the important thing. In the revolt against formula, revolutionaries in art sell themselves to nature. Without nature's aid the coup could not be accomplished. They of course become quite satisfied slaves of nature as their fathers were of formula. It never occurs to them that nature is just a sterile attirent. This is what happened with the Impressionists. An idea which haunts the head of many people is that nature is synonymous with freshness, richness, constant renewal, life. Nature and natural art synonymous with life. This idea, trotted out in various forms, reminds one of the sententious pronouncements one so often hears. Life is the important thing. It is always said with an air of trenchant and final wisdom, the implication being, you artists are so indirect and intellectual, worry your heads about this and about that, while life is there all the time, etc etc. If you ask these people what they mean by life, for there are as many lives as there are people in the world, it becomes evident that they have no profounder view of life in their mind than can be included in the good dinner, good sleep, role in the grass category. After all, life is the important thing. That is to live as nearly like a chicken or a king Charles as is compatible with having red sex and character and lile de pengua in a translation. This is the typical cowardly attitude of those who have failed with their minds and are discouraged and unstrung before the problems of their spirit who fall back on their stomachs and the meaner working of their senses. Nature will give you then, grass enough for cow or a sheep, any fleshly conquest you can compass. One thing she is unable to give, that is peculiar to men. Such stranger stuff men must get out of themselves. To consider for a moment this widespread notion that nature as the majority mean it is synonymous really with life and inexhaustible freshness of material. Nature is no more inexhaustible fresh, welling up with invention etc than life is to the average man of 40 with his groove, his disillusion and his little round of habitual distractions. It is true, life is there all the time, but he cannot get at it except through himself. For him too, even apart from his daily fodder, he has to draw out of himself any of that richness and fineness that is something more indifferent to the provender and contentment of the cow. For the suicide with the pistol in his mouth, life is there as well, with its variety and possibilities, but a dissertation to that effect would not influence him. On the contrary, for those men who look to nature for support, she does not care. Life is a hospital for the weak and incompetent. Life is a retreat of the defeated. It is very salubrious, the cooking is good, amusements are provided. In the same way, nature is a blessed retreat, in art, for those artists whose imagination is mean and feeble, whose vocation and instincts are unrobust. When they find themselves in front of infinite nature with their little paint box, they squint their eyes at her professionally and coo with lazy contentment and excitement, to just so much effort as is hygienic and desirable. She does their thinking and seeing for them. Of course, when they commence painting, technical difficulties come along, they sweat a bit and anxiety settles down on them, but then they regard themselves as martyrs and heroes. They are lusty workmen grappling with the difficulties of their trade. No wonder painting has been discredited. Life is the important thing, indeed. If much painting of life that we see is the alternative, who would not rather walk ten miles across country, yes, ten miles, my friend, and use his eyes, nose and muscles, than possess ten thousand impressionist oil paintings of that countryside. There is only one thing better than life, than using your eyes, nose, ears and muscles, and that is something very abtruse and splendid, in no way directly dependent on life. It is no equivalent for life, but another life, as necessary to existence as the former. This necessity is what the indolent and vulgar journalist mind chiefly denies it. All the accusations of mere intelligence or cold intellectuality centre round misconception of this fact. Before leaving this beautiful, useful phrase of unctuous life, etc., I would prevent a confusion. I have been speaking so far of the impressionist sensibility, and one of the arguments used by that sensibility to disparage the products of a new effort in art. Dormier, whose work was saturated with reference to life, has been, for instance, used to support imitation of nature on grounds of a common realism. This man would have been no more capable of squatting down and imitating the forms of life, day after day, than he would have been able to copy one of his crowds. It was life that moved much too quickly for anything but the imagination that he lived for. He combined in his art great plastic gifts with great literary gifts, and was no doubt an impure painter according to actual standards, but it was great literature, always, along with great art, and as far as life is concerned, the impressionists produced nothing that was in any sense a progress from this great realist, though much that was a decadence. Many reproductions of Degas paintings it would be impossible, quite literally, to distinguish from photographs, and his pastels only less so because of the accident of the medium. The relative purity of their palette and consequence habituating of the public to brighter colours was their only useful innovation. Their analytic study of light led into the pointe least cul-de-sac. When it was found that although light can be decomposed, oil paint is, unfortunately, not light. Futurism, magic and life 1. The futurist theoretician should be a professor of Hoffman romance, and attempt the manufacture of a perfect being. Art merges in life again everywhere. Leonardo was the first futurist, and, incidentally, an airman among quattrocento angels. His Mona Lisa eloped from the louvre like any woman. She is back again now, smiling, with complacent reticence, as before her escapade. No one can say when she will be off once more. She possesses so much vitality. Her olive pigment is electric, so much more so than the carnivorous Belgium bumpkins by Rubens in a neighbouring room, who, besides, are so big they could not slip about in the same subtle fashion. Rubens' imitated life, borrowed the colour of its crude blood, traced the sprawling and surging of its animal hulks. Leonardo made new beings, delicate and severe, with as ambitious an intention as any ingenious medieval empiric. He multiplied in himself, too, life's possibilities. He was not content to be as an individual artist alone any more than he was content with art. Life won him with gifts and talents. 2. In Northern Europe, Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, for the last half-century, the intellectual world has developed savagely in one direction, that of life. His war-talk, sententious elevation and much besides, Marionetti picked up from Nietzsche. Strindberg with his hysterical and puissant autobiographies, life-long tragic cockatry with magic. Extensive probing of female flesh and spirit is the great Scandinavian figure, best representing this tendency. Berkson, the philosopher of Impressionism, stands for this new prescience in France. Everywhere life is said instead of art. 3. By life is not meant good dinner, sleep and copulation. There is rather only room for one life in existence, and art has to behave itself and struggle. Also art has a selfish trick of cutting the connections. The wild body and primitive brain have found a new outside art of their own. The artist's pleasure man is too naturalistic for this age of religion. The theatre is immoral, because a place where people go to enjoy other people's sufferings and tears. To D'Alembert. The soft stormy flood of Russoism, Dickens' sentimental gul-like gloating over the death of little Nell, the beastly and ridiculous spirit of Keith Slines. If you're mistress, some rich anger-show, imprison her soft hand and let her rave, while you feast long, etc. He disgusted about 1,870 people who had not got a corner in dogs' nerves or hearts idling about the stomach, instead of attending to its business of pump, and whose heads were, with an honest Birmingham screw, straightly riveted into their bodies. The good artists as well repudiated the self-indulgent, special-privileged, prigish and cowardly role of artist, and joined themselves to the Birmingham screws. England emerged from Lupinars and Satanics about 1900, the bourgeoisie having thoughtfully put wild in prison, and Swinburne being retired definitely to Putney. This brings you to the famous age where we are at present gathered, in which humanity's problem is, live with the minimum of pleasure possible for bare existence. Killing somebody must be the greatest pleasure in existence, either like killing yourself without being interfered with by the instinct of self-preservation, or exterminating the instinct of self-preservation itself. But, if you begin depositing your little titivations of pleasure in humanity's savings bank, you want something for your trouble. We all have a penetrative right over each other, to the tune of titivations lost, if not of heart's blood. Five. Not many people have made up their minds yet as to the ultimate benefit or the reverse of this state of affairs. Some people enjoy best by proxy, some by masturbation. Others prefer to do things themselves, or in the direct regular partnership of existence. You are fiercely secretive and shy, or dislike interference. Most fine artists cannot keep themselves out of wood and iron, or printed sheets. They leave too much of themselves in their furniture. For their universality, a course of egoistic hardening, if anything, is required. Budda found that his disciples, good average disciples, required a severe discipline of expansion. He made them practice every day torpedoing east and west, to inhabit other men, and become wise and gentle. The artist favours solitude, conditions where silence and purity are possible, as most men favour gregariousness, where they shine and exist most. But the artist is compensated at present by a crown, and will eventually arrange things for the best. 6. It is all a matter of the most delicate adjustment between the veracity of art and digestive quality of life. The finest art is not pure abstraction, nor is it unorganised life. Dreams come in the same category as the easy abstractions and sentimentalities of art known as Belgian. Great artists with their pictures and books provide nursing homes for the future, where hypnotic treatment is the principal stunt. To dream is the same thing as to lie. Anybody but an invalid or a canine, feels the discomfort and repugnance of something not clean in it. There is much fog in the past, due no doubt to the fact that most of the ordinary ancients neglected their persons. Realism is the cleanliness of the mind. Actuality or fashionableness is the desire to be spic and span, and be a man remade and burnished half an hour ago. Surprise is the brilliant and prodigious firefly that lives only 20 minutes. The excitement of seeing him burn through his existence, like a wax fester, makes you marvel at the slow living world. The most perishable colours in painting, such as Veronese Green, Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson, are the most brilliant. This is as it should be. We should hate other ages and don't want to fetch £40,000 like a horse. Seven. The actual approximation of art to nature, which one sees great signs of today, would negative efforts equally. The artist like Narcissus gets his nose nearer and nearer the surface of life. He will get it nipped off if he is not careful, by some pecsniff shark sunning its lean belly near the surface, or other lurker beneath his image who has been feeding on its radiance. Reality is in the artist, the image only in life, and he should only approach so near as is necessary for a good view. The question of focus depends on the power of his eyes, or their quality. Eight. The futurist statue will move, then it will live a little, but any idiot can do better than that with his good wife round the corner. Nature's definitely ahead of us in contrivances of that sort. We must remain children, less scientific than a boy scout, but less naive than Flaubert Jeune. Nature is grown up. We could not make an elephant. Nine. With Picasso's revolution in the plastic arts, the figure of the artist becomes still more blurred and uncertain. Engineer or artist might conceivably become transposable terms, or one at least imply the other. What is the definite character of the artist? Obvious pleasure as an element shrinking daily, or rather approximating with pleasure as it exists in every other form of invention. Picasso has proved himself lately too amateurish a carpenter, boot-making and joining also occur to one, or the artist will cease to be a workman and take his place with the composer and architect. The artist till now has been his own interpreter, improvisation and accidents of a definite medium playing a very important part. Today there are a host of first-rate interpreters. The few men with the invention and brain should have these at their disposal, but unfortunately they all want to be composers, and their skill and temperament allow them to do very good imitations. But perhaps things are better as they are, for if you think of those stormy Jewish faces met in the corridors of the tube, Beethoven-esque and femininely ferocious on the concert bills, or our great Shakespearean actors, you feel that Beethoven and Shakespeare are for the student and not for the Bechstein Hall or the modern theatre. At any period an artist should have been able to remain in his studio, imagining form and provided he could transmit the substance and logic of his inventions to another man, could have, without putting brush to canvas, been the best artist of his day. Note on some German woodcuts at the 21 gallery. At this miniature sculpture, the woodcuts, Germans have always excelled. It is like a one-string fiddle of the African. This art is African, in that it is sturdy, cutting through every time to the monotonous wall of space, and intense yet hail, permeated by eternity, an atmosphere in which only the black core of life rises and is silhouetted. The black nervous fluid of existence flows and forms into hard stagnant masses in this white luminous body, or it is like a vivid sea pierced by rocks onto the surface of which bone shapes rise and bask blackly. It deals with man and objects subject to him, unroyal white, cut out in black sadness. White and black are two elements, their possible proportions and relations to each other are fixed. All the subtleties of the universe are driven into these two pens, one of which is black, the other white, with their multitude. It is African black. It is not black invaded by colour, as in Beardsley, who was never simple enough for this blackness, but on varying vivid, harsh black of Africa. The quality of the woodcuts is rough and brutal, surgery of the senses, cutting and not scratching, extraordinarily limited and exasperating. It is one of the greatest tests of fineness. Where the Germans are best, disciplined, blunt, thick and brutal, with a black simple skeleton of organic emotion they best qualify for this form of art. All the things gathered here do not come within these definitions. Meltzer is sculpture too, but by suggestion, not in fact. The principle of his work is an infatuation for bronzes. Peckstein has for nearest parallel the drawings and lithographs of Henri Matisse. Mark, Bolz, Kandinsky, Helbing and Morgner would make a very solid show in one direction. Bolz's mask and vest is a commesse of black strips and atoms of life. His other design, like a playing card, is a nerve or woman and a tendon to fascinated atoms, crushed or starred. Morgner drifts into soft arctic snow patches. Mark merges once more in leaves and sunspotting the protective markings of animals, or in this process makes a forest into tigers. Some woodcuts by Mr H. Wadsworth, though not part of the German show, are to be seen in the gallery. One of a port is particularly fine, with its white excitement and a compression of clean metallic shapes in the well of the harbour, as though in a broken cannon mouth. Policeman and Artist One In France, no artist is as good as the policeman. Rousseau, the douagne, the best policeman, is better than Derang, the best French artist. Not until art reaches the freshest strata of the people does it find a vigorous enough bed to flourish. There is too much cultivation, and only the man of the people escapes the softening and intellectualising. There is one exception, the Cretan or Sony. Cézanne was an imbecile, as Rousseau was a policeman. Nature's defence for Cézanne against the deadly intelligence of his country was to make him a sort of idiot. Two, in England the policeman is dull. The people witness dearth of folk song, ornaments, dance, art of any sort, till you get to the border or the marches of Wales, is incapable of art. The artist in England has the advantages and gifts possessed by the policeman in France. His position is very similar. Three, William Blake was our arch policeman. Had Blake, instead of passing his time with Renaissance bogies and athletes, painted his wife and himself naked in their conservatory, as in a more realistic tradition he quite conceivably might have done, the results would have been very similar to Rousseau's portraits. The English artist, unlike the Frenchman of the people, has no artistic tradition in his blood. His freshness and genius is apt to be obscured, therefore, as in the case of Blake, the English artist, by a borrowed Italian one. It is almost as dangerous in England to be a sowny as it is in France to be intelligent. Cézanne in England would have to be a very intelligent fellow. You can't be too intelligent here. It is the only place in Europe where that is the case. Blake in France would have been a policeman. It is finer to be an artist than to be a policeman, feng shui in contemporary form. One, that a mountain, river, or person may not suit the air of the mountain, the character of the person, and so influence lives, most men see. But that a hill or a man can be definitely disastrous, and by mere existence, be as unlucky as hemlock is poisonous, shame or stupidity prevents most from admitting. A certain position of the eyes, their fires crossing, black as a sort of red as sinister, white the morning colour of China, white flowers in the west signifying death, white the radium among colours and the colour that comes from farthest off, thirteen a terrible number, such are more important discoveries than gravitation. The law of gravitation took its place in our common science, following the fall of an apple on somebody's head which induced reflection. Thirteen struck people down again and again like a ghost, till they ceased hunting for something human but invisible, and found a number betraying its tragic nature and destiny. Some numbers are like great suns, round which the whole of humanity must turn, but people have a special personal numerical which for them in particular is an object of service and respect. Two, telegraph poles were the gloomiest of all western innovations for China. Their heights disturbed definitely the delicate equilibrium of lives. They were consequently resisted with bitterness. Any textbook on China becomes really eloquent in its scorn when it arrives at the ascendancy of the Geomancers. Geomancy is the art by which the favourable influence of the shape of trees, weight of neighbouring water and its colour, height of surrounding houses, is determined. No Chinese street is built to form a line of uniform height, Ha Giles. The houses are of unequal heights to fit the destinies of the inhabitants. I do not suppose that good Geomancers are more frequent than good artists, but their functions and intellectual equipment should be very alike. Three, sensitiveness to volume, to the life and passion of lines, meaning of water, hurried conversation of the sky or silence, impossible propinquity of endless clay, nothing will write, a mountain that is a genius, good or evil, or a boar, makes the artist. And the volume, quality or luminosity of a star at birth of astrologers is also a clairvoyance within the painter's gift. In a painting, certain forms must be so. In the same meticulous, profound manner that your pen or a book must lie on the table at a certain angle, your clothes at night be arranged in a set's personal symmetry, certain birds be avoided, a set of railings tapped with your hand as you pass without missing one. Personal tricks and ceremonies of this description are casual examples of the same senses activity, relativism and Picasso's latest work. Small structures in cardboard, wood, zinc, glass string, etc., tacked, sewn or stuck together is what Picasso has last shown as his. One, Picasso has become a miniature naturalistic sculptor of the vast natures, moat of modern life. Picasso has come out of the canvas and has commenced to build up his shadows against reality. Reality is the Waterloo, Will of the Wisp, or Siren of Artistic Genius. Reality is to the artist what truth is to the philosopher. The artist's objective is reality, the philosopher's is truth. The real thing is always nothing, reality is the nearest conscious and safe place to reality. Once an artist gets caught in that machinery, he is soon cut in half, literally so. Two, the moment an image steps from the convention of the canvas into life, its destiny is different. The statue has been, for the most part, a stone man. An athletic and compact statue survives, African Egyptian art etc., where faces are flattened, limbs carved in the mass of the body for safety as well as sacredness. You can believe that a little patch of paint two inches high on a piece of canvas is a mountain. It is difficult to do so with a two inch clay or stone model of one. Three, these little models of Picasso's reproduced the surface and texture of objects. So directly so that, should a portion of human form occur, he would hardly be content until he could include in his work a plot of human flesh. But it is essentially Natuomort, the enamel of a kettle, wallpaper, a canary's cage, handle of mandolin or telephone. Four, these wayward little objects have a splendid air, starting up in pure creation with their invariable and lofty detachment from any utilitarian end or purpose. But they do not seem to possess the necessary physical stamina to survive. You feel the glue will come unstuck, and that you would only have to blow with your mouth to shatter them. They imitate, like children, the large unconscious, serious machines and contrivances of modern life. So near them do they come that they appear even a sort of new little parasite bred on machinery. Finally they lack the one purpose or even necessity of a work of art, namely life. Five, in the experiments of modern art we come face to face with the question of the raison d'etre of art more acutely than often before. And the answer comes more clearly and unexpectedly. Most of Picasso's latest work on canvas as well is a sort of machinery. Yet these machines neither propel nor make any known thing. They are machines without a purpose. If you conceive them as carried out on a grand scale, as some elaborate work of engineering, the paradox becomes more striking. These machines would, in that case, before the perplexed and enraged questions of men, have only one answer and justification. If they could suggest or convince that they were machines of life, a sort of living plastic geometry, then their existence would be justified. Six, to say why any particular man is alive is a difficult business, and we cannot obviously ask more of a picture than of a man. A picture either is or it is not. A work of art could not start from such a purpose as the manufacture of nibs or nails. These mysterious machines of modern art are what they are to be alive. Many of Picasso's works answer this requirement, but many, notably the latest small sculpture he has shown, attacks themselves too coldly to other machines of daily use and inferior significance. Or, he practically makes little natural mort, a kettle plate and a piece of wallpaper, for example. He no longer so much interprets as definitely makes nature and dead nature at that. A kettle is never as fine as a man. This is a challenge to the kettles. The New Egos One, a civilized savage in a desert city, surrounded by very simple objects and restricted number of beings, reduces his great art down to the simple black human bullet. His sculpture is monotonous. The only compact human form is his tom-tom. We have nothing whatever to do with this individual and his bullet. Our eyes sweep life horizontally. Worthy in the top of our head and full of blank light, our art would be different and more like that of the savage. The African we have referred to cannot allow his personality to venture forth or amplify itself, for it would dissolve in vagueness of space. It has to be swaddled up in a bullet-like lump. But the modern town-dweller of our civilization sees everywhere fraternal moulds for his spirit and interstices of a human world. He also sees multitude and infinite variety of all means of life, a world and elements he controls. Impersonality becomes a disease with him. Socially, in a parallel manner, his egotism takes a different form. Society is sufficiently organized for his ego to walk abroad. Life is really no more secure, or his egotism less acute, but the frontiers interpenetrate. Individual demarcations are confused and interests dispersed. 2. According to the most approved contemporary methods in boxing, two men burrow into each other, and, after an infinitude of little intimate pummel, one collapses. In the old style, two distinct heroic figures were confronted, and one ninepin tried to knock the other ninepin over. We all today, possibly with a coldness reminiscent of the insect world, are in each other's vitals, overlap, intersect, and are siamese to any extent. 3. Promiscuity is normal. Such separating things as love, hatred, friendship are superseded by a more realistic and logical passion. The human form still runs like a wave through the texture or body of existence, and therefore of art. But just as the old form of egotism is no longer fit for such conditions as now prevail, so the isolated human figure of most ancient art isn't an acronism. The actual human body becomes of less importance every day. It now literally exists much less. Love, hatred, etc. imply conventional limitations. All clean, clear-cut emotions depend on the element of strangeness and surprise and primitive detachment. Dehumanization is the chief diagnostic of the modern world. One feels the immanence of some reality more than any form of human beings can have felt it. This superseding of specific passions and easily determinable emotions by such uniform, more animal instinctively logical passion of life, of different temperatures, but similar in kind, is then the phenomenon to which we would relate the most fundamental tendencies in present art, and by which we would gauge its temper. Orchestra of Media Painting with the Venetians was like piano forte playing as compared to the extended complicated orchestra aspired to by the artist today. Sculpture of the single sententious or sentimental figure on the one hand, and painting as a dignified accomplished game on the other, is breaking up and caving in. The medium of oil paint is modifiable like an instrument. Few today have forsaken it for the more varied instruments or orchestra of media would have contented themselves with violating it. The reflection back on the present, however, of this imminent extension, for at least the preparation for this taking in of other media, has for effect a breaking up of the values of beauty etc in contemporary painting. The surfaces of cheap manufactured goods, woods, steel, glass etc already appreciated for themselves, and their possibilities realised have finished the days of fine paint. Even if painting remain intact, it will be much more supple and extended, containing all the elements of discord and ugliness consequence on the attack against traditional harmony. The possibilities of colour, exploitation of discords, odious combinations etc have been little exploited. A painter like Matisse has always been harmonious, with a scale of colour pleasantly Chinese. Kandinsky at his best is much more original and bitter, but there are fields of discord untouched. The melodrama of modernity. 1. Of all the tags going, futurist for general application serves as well as any for the active painters of today. It is picturesque and easily inclusive. It is especially justifiable here in England where no particular care or knowledge of the exact or any other in matters of art, signification of this word exist. In France for instance, no one would be likely to apply the term futurist for Picasso or Derang, for everyone there is familiar with Marinette's personality, the detail of his propaganda, and also the general history of the Cubist movement, Picasso's part, Derang's part, and the futurists. On the other hand here in England, Marquet, Vuillard, Benard even, I expect, would be called futurist fairly often. As futurist in England does not mean anything more than a painter, either a little or very much occupying himself with questions of a renovation of art, and showing a tendency to rebellion against the domination of the past, it is not necessary to correct it. We may hope before long to find a new word. If Kandinsky had found a better word than expressionist, he might have supplied a useful alternative. Futurism, as preached by Marinette, is largely impressionism up to date. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt. With a lot of good sense and vitality at his disposal, he hammers away in the blatant mechanism of his manifestos, at his Ede fix of modernity. From that harsh swarming of animal vitality, in almost eastern cities across the Alps, his is a characteristic voice, with excretion making his teeth ragged, blood weltering and leaping round his eyes. He snarls and bawls about the past and future, with all his Italian practical directness. This is of great use when one considers with what sort of person the artist today has to deal. His certain success in England is similar to that of Giovanni Grasso. Any spectacular display of temperament carries away the English crowd. With an Italian crowd, it has not the same effect. The popular orator again possesses qualities which attach him, on the one hand, to a vitality possessed by all artists are cut above the senile prig, and on the other hand, he has access to the vitality of the people. 3. Futureism then, in its narrow sense and in the history of modern painting, is a picturesque, superficial and romantic rebellion of young Milanese painters against the academism which surrounded them. Gino Severini was the most important. Severini, with his little blocks, strips and triangles of colour, zones of movement, etc., made many excellent plastic discoveries. I say was because today there are practically no futurists or at least automobileists left. Balla is the best painter of what was once the automobileist group. 4. Modernity for Severini consisted in the night cafes of Paris. It is doubtful whether the future of his or anyone else's ism will contain such places. We all foresee, as I have argued in another place, in a century or so, men and women being put to bed at seven o'clock by a state nurse, in separate beds of course. 5. No cocotte for genos of the future. With the careful choice of motor omnibuses, cars, life, aeroplanes, etc., the automobileist pictures were too picturesque, melodramatic and spectacular, besides being undigested and naturalistic to a fault. Severini only seemed to me to escape by his feeling for pattern and certain clearness and restraint, even in the excesses of a gigantic set piece. The melodrama of modernity is the subject of these fanciful but rather conventional Italians. Romance about science is a thing we have all been used to for many years, and we resent it being used as a source for a dish claiming to belong strictly to emancipated futures. A motor omnibus can be just as romantically seen as Caris Brook Castle or Shakespeare's House at Stratford. I do not hold a brief oppose to romance, but most of the futurist work is in essence as sentimental as but join his large earlier picture at the Sackville Gallery Show, called The Building of a City. This was sheer unadulterated Belgian romance, blue clouds of smoke, pawing horses, heroic grimy workers, sententious skyscrapers, factory chimneys etc. If divested of this element of illustration, H.G. Wells' romance and pedantic naturalism, Marinetti's movement could produce profounder visions with this faith of novelty, something fine might be done, for it does not matter what incentive the artist has to creation. Schiller always kept a few rotten pairs in his draw, and when he felt the time had come to write another lyric, he would go to his draw and take out a rotten pair. He would sniff and sniff. When he felt the lyric rising from the depths of him in response, he would put the pair back and seize the pen. If dynamic considerations intoxicate Balla and make him produce significant patterns, as they do, all is well. Five, but as I have said, Balla is not a futurist in the Automobilist sense. He is a rather violent and geometric sort of expressionist. His paintings are purely abstract, he does not give you bits of automobiles or complete naturalistic fragments of noses and ears or any of the Automobilist bag of tricks in short. So, in the present and latest exhibition of futurists at the Doré gallery, there are no futurists left, except perhaps the faithful Lieutenant Bottioni, although he too becomes less representative and more abstract every day. As to the rest, they seem to have become quite conventional and dull Cubists or Picassoists, with nothing left of their still duller Automobilism, but letters and bits of newspaper stuck all over the place. Six, cannot Marinetti, sensible and energetic man that he is, be induced to throw over this sentimental rubbish about automobiles and aeroplanes, and follow his friend Balla into a purer region of art. Unless he wants to become a rapidly fossilizing monument of puerility, cheap reaction and sensationalism, he had better do so. The Exploitation of Vulgarity When an ugly or uncomely person appeared on the horizon of their daily promenade, Angrae's careful wife would raise her shawl protectingly, and he would be spared a sight that would have offended him. Today the artist's attention would be drawn on the country to anything particularly hideous or banal as a thing not to be missed. Stupidity has always been exquisite and ugliness fine. Aristophanes loved a fool as much as any man his shapely sweetheart. Perhaps his weakness for fools dulled his appreciation of the sages. No doubt in a perfectly wholesome, classic state of existence, humour would be almost absent and discords would be scrupulously shunned, or exist only as a sacred disease that an occasional man was blighted with. We don't want, today, things made entirely of gold, but gold mixed with flint or grass, diamond with paste, etc., any more than a monotonous paradise or security would be palatable. But the condition of our enjoyment of vulgarity, discord, cheapness or noise is an unimpaired and keen disgust with it. It depends that is on sufficient health, not to relinquish the consciousness of what is desirable and beneficial. Rare and cheap, fine and poor, these contrasts are the male and female, the principle of creation today. This pessimism is the triumphant note in modern art. A man could make just as fine an art in discords and with nothing but ugly, trivial and terrible materials as any classic artist did with only beautiful and pleasant means. But it would have to be a very tragic and pure creative instinct. Life today is giddily frank and the fool is everywhere serene and blatant. Human insanity has never flowered so colossally. Our material of discord is to an unparalleled extent, forcible and virulent. Pleasantness too has an edge or a softness of unusual strength. The world may at any moment take a turn and become less vulgar and stupid. The great artist must not miss this opportunity, but he must not so dangerously identify himself with vulgarity as Picasso for instance, inclines to identify himself with the appearance of nature. There are possibilities for the great artist in the picture postcard. The ice is thin and there is as well the perpetual peril of virtuosity. The improvement of life. The passion of his function to order and transmute is exasperated in the artist of today by vacuity and complication, as it was in the case of the imitators of romanticism before wild nature. One of the most obvious questions that might have been put to any naturalistic painter of 20 years ago or for that matter to Rembrandt or a Japanese was this. Is there no difference, or if so what difference between a bad piece of architecture or a good piece represented in a painting or rather would it be a greater type of art that's had for representative content objects finer in themselves. This kind of argument of course refers only to the representative painter. Rembrandt might have replied that there is no fine man or poor man that vulgarity is as good as nobleness. It's in his paintings all things were equal. But in taking Rembrandt's the points may be confused by sentimentality about a great artist, touching old beggar man, soul painting etc. Just as profound sentimentality might arise about newness, brand newness, as about age, ruins, mould and dilapidation. Everyone admits that the interior of an ABC shop is not as fine as the interior of some building conceived by a great artist. Yet it would probably inspire an artist today better than the more perfect building. With its trivial ornamentation, mirrors, cheap marble tables, silly spacing etc. it nevertheless suggests a thousand great possibilities for the painter. Where is the advantage then for the painter today, for Rembrandt or for a Japanese, in having a better standard of taste in architecture, fine addresses etc. 2. If it were not that vulgarity and the host of cheap artisans compete in earning with the true artist immeasurably more than in a great period of art, the present would be an ideal time for creative genius. Adverse climatic conditions, drastic Russian winters for example, account for much thought and profundity. England which stands for anti-art, mediocrity and brainliness among the nations of Europe should be the most likely place for great art to spring up. England is just as unkind and inimical to art as the arctic zone is to life. This is the Siberia of the mind. If you grant this you will at once see the source and reason of my very genuine optimism. 1. Our vortex is not afraid of the past, it has forgotten its existence. Our vortex regards the future as as sentimental as the past. The future is distant like the past and therefore sentimental. The mere element past must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind is sentimental. The present can be intensely sentimental, especially if you exclude the mere element past. Our vortex does not deal in reactive action only, nor identify the presence with numbing displays of vitality. The new vortex plunges to the heart of the present. The chemistry of the present is different to that of the past. With this different chemistry we produce a new living abstraction. The Rembrandt vortex swamps the Netherlands with a flood of dreaming. The Turner vortex rushed at Europe with a wave of light. We wish the past and future with us, the past to mop up our melancholy, the future to absorb our troublesome optimism. With our vortex the present is the only active thing. Life is the past and the future. The present is art. 2. Our vortex insists on watertight compartments. There is no present, there is past and future, and there is art. Any moment not weakly relaxed and slip back, or on the other hand dreaming optimistically is art. Just life or so disont reality is a fourth quantity made up of the past, the future and art. This impure present our vortex despises and ignores, but our vortex is uncompromising. We must have the past and the future life simple that is to discharge ourselves in and keep us pure for non-life that is art. The past and future are the prostitutes nature has provided. Art is periodic escapes from this brothel. Artists put as much vitality and delight into this saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence. The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest. The Vorticist is not the slave of commotion but its master. The Vorticist does not suck up to life. He lets life know its place in a Vorticist universe. 3. In a Vorticist universe we don't get excited at what we have invented. If we did, it would look as though it had been a fluke. It is not a fluke. We have no verbotants. There is one truth, ourselves and everything is permitted. But we are not Templars. We are proud, handsome and predatory. We hunt machines, they are our favourite game. We invent them and then hunt them down. This is a great Vorticist age. A great still age of artists. 4. As to the lean, belated impressionism at present attempting to eke out a little life in these islands. Our Vortex is fed up with your dispersals, reasonable chicken men. Our Vortex is proud of its polished sides. Our Vortex will not hear of anything but its disastrous polished dance. Our Vortex desires the immobile rhythm of its swiftness. Our Vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your impressionistic fuss. Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red hot swiftness. End of Part 8. Part 9 of Blast Issue Number 1, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Frederick Spencer Gore by Wyndham Lewis. Born in 1879, Gore died on March 27, 1914 of pneumonia after an illness of three days. Had he lived, his dogged almost romantic industry, his passion for the delicate object set in the London atmosphere around him, his great conception of the artist's life, his gentleness and fineness would have matured into an abundant personal art, something like Coro and guessing. His habit of telling you of things he had his eye on and intended painting three years hence, and all his system of work was with reference to minute and persistent labour, implying a good spell of life which almost retarded accomplishment. He projected himself into the years of work before him and organised clearly what was to be done. He possessed physically a busy time three years away as much as today. A boastfully confident attitude to time's expanse and absence of recognition of the common need to hurry characterised him. Death cut all this short to the dismay of those who had known him from the start and regarded confidently like him this great artist and dear friend as a permanent thing in their lives and his work as in safe hands and sure of due fulfilment. His leisureliness and confidence were infectious. His painting as it is although incomplete is full of illustrations of a mature of future. His latest work with an accentuation of structural qualities, a new and suave simplicity, might in the case of several examples I know be placed beside that of any of the definitely gracious artists in Europe. The welter of pale and rather somber colour filling London backyards. The rather distant still and sultry well-being of a Camden Town summer in trivial credence with tall trees and toy trains was one of his favourite themes. He was a painter of the London summer, of heavy dull sunlight, of exquisite respectable and stodgy houses more than anybody else. The years he spent working on scenes from the London Music Halls brought to light a new world of witty illusion. I much prefer Gore's paintings of the theatre to de gas. Gore gets everything that de gas with his hard and rather paltry science apparently did not see. He had an admirable master for his drawing in Mr Walter Sickert to whose advice and friendship he no doubt owed more than to anybody else's. But he was quite independent of Mr Sickert or of any group of artists, and even diametrically opposed to many of his friends in his feeling towards the latest movement in painting which from the first he gave his word for. Some of his work towards the end belonged rather to this present movement than to any other. The memorial exhibition of his work shortly to be held should, if possible, since the cabaret club has closed contain the large paintings he did for that place. End of part nine. Part ten of Blast, issue number one. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. To suffragettes. A word of advice. In destruction as in other things stick to what you understand. We make you a present of our votes. Only leave works of art alone. You might someday destroy a good picture by accident. Then, Miss Soyer Bonfee, nous vous aimons. We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things, you don't mind being called things, left in England with a little life in them. If you destroy a great work of art, you are destroying a greater soul than if you annihilated a whole district of London. Leave art alone, brave comrades. End of part ten. Part eleven of Blast, issue number one. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Vortex. Pound. The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents in mechanics the greatest efficiency. We use the words greatest efficiency in the precise sense as they would be used in a textbook of mechanics. You may think of a man as that towards which perception moves. You may think of him as the toy of circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impressions. Or you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely observing and reflecting. The primary pigment. The vorticist relies on this alone, on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else. Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It is the picture that means a hundred poems. The music that means a hundred pictures. The most highly energised statement. The statement that has not yet spent itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing. The turbine. All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energised past. All the past that is living and worthy to live. All momentum which is the past bearing upon us. Race, race memory. Instinct charging the placid, non-energised future. The design of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital. All the past that is capable of living into the future is pregnant in the vortex now. Hedonism is the vacant place of a vortex. Without force, the prived of past and of future. The vortex of a still spool or cone. Futurism is the discouraging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it. Dispersal. Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound to music. If formed words to literature. The image to poetry. Form to design. Color in position to painting. Form or design in three planes. To sculpture. Movement to the dance or to the rhythm of music or of verses. Elaboration. Expression of second intensities. Of disburseness belong to the secondary sort of artist. Dispursed arts had a vortex. Impressionism. Futurism. Which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism. Deny the vortex. They are the corpses of vortices. Popular beliefs. Movements etc. Are the corpses of vortices. Marinetti is a corpse. The man. The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy. Not upon likeness or mimicry. In painting he does not rely upon the likeness to a beloved grandmother or to a caressible mistress. Vortices and his arts before it has spread itself into a state of flaccidity. Of elaboration. Of secondary applications. Ancestry. All arts approach the conditions of music. Painter. An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound. You are interested in a certain painting because it is an arrangement of lines and colours. Whistler. Picasso. Kandinsky. Father and mother. Classicism and romanticism of the movement. Poetry. The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art. Primary pigment of poetry is the image. The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to drag itself out into mimicry. In painting Kandinsky. Picasso. In poetry this by HD. Whirl up sea. Whirl your pointed pines. Splash your great pines on our rocks. Hurl your green over us. Cover us with your pools of fur. End of Part 11. Part 12 of Blast. Issue Number 1. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Vortex. Gordie Brezhka. Sculptural energy is the mountain. Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes. The Paleolithic Vortex resulted in the decoration of the Dordogna Caverns. Early Stone Age man disputed the earth with animals. His livelihood depended on the hazards of the hunt. His greatest victory, the domestication of a few species. Out of the mines primordially preoccupied with animals, Fond de Gaume gained its procession of horses carved in the rock. The driving power was life in the absolute. The plastic expression the fruitful sphere. The sphere is thrown through space. It is the sole and object of the vortex. The intensity of existence had revealed to man a truth of form. His manhood was strained to the highest potential. His energy brutal. His opulent maturity was convex. The acute fights subsided at the birth of the three primary civilizations. It always retained more intensity east. The Hamite Vortex of Egypt, the land of plenty. Man succeeded in his far-reaching speculations, honor to the divinity. Religion pushed him to the use of the vertical, which inspires awe. His gods were self-made. He built them in his image and retained as much of the sphere as could round the sharpness of the parallelogram. He preferred the pyramid to the mastaba. The fair Greek felt this influence across the middle sea. The fair Greek saw himself only. He petrified his own semblance. His sculpture was derivative. His feeling for form secondary. The absence of direct energy lasted for a thousand years. The Indians felt the Hamitic influence through Greek spectacles. Their extreme temperament inclined towards asceticism. Admiration of non-desire as a balance against abuse produced a kind of sculpture without new form perception, and which is the result of the peculiar vortex of blackness and silence. Plastic soul is intensity of life bursting the plane. The German barbarians were verily world by the mysterious need of acquiring new arable lands. They moved restlessly, like strong oxen stampeding. The Semitic vortex was the lust of war. The men of Elam, of Asur, of Babel, and the Kitta. The men of Armenia and those of Canaan had to slay each other cruelly for the possession of fertile valleys. Their gods sent them the vertical direction, the earth, the sphere. They elevated the sphere in a splendid squatness and created the horizontal. From Sargon to Amianasiapal, men built man-headed bulls in horizontal flight walk. Men flayed their captives alive and erected howling lions. The elongated horizontal sphere buttressed on four columns and their kingdoms disappeared. Christ flourished and perished in Yuda. Christianity gained Africa and from the seaports of the Mediterranean it won the Roman Empire. The stampeding Franks came into violent contact with it, as well as with the Greco-Roman tradition. They were swamped by the remote reflections of the two vortices of the west. Gothic sculpture was but a faint echo of the Hamito-Semitic energies through Roman traditions, and it lasted half a thousand years and it's willfully divided again into the Greek derivation from the land of Amenra. Vortex of a vortex. Vortex is the point one and indivisible. Vortex is energy and it gave forth solid excrements in the Cuatro E Cincocento, liquid until the 17th century, gases whistled till now. This is the history of form value in the west until the fall of Impressionism. The black haired men who wandered through the paths of Cotan into the valley of the Yellow River lived peacefully tilling their lands and they grew prosperous. Their Paleolithic feeling was intensified as gods they had themselves in the persons of their human ancestors and of the spirits of the horse and of the land and the grain. The sphere swayed, the vortex was absolute, the Shang and Chao dynasties produced the convex bronze vases. The features of Tautier were inscribed inside of the square with the rounded corners. The centupal spherical frog presided over the inverted truncated cone that is the bronze wardrum. The vortex was intense maturity. Maturity is fecundity, they grew numerous and it lasted for 6000 years. The force relapsed and they accumulated wealth, for suck their work and losing their form understanding through the Han and Tang dynasties they founded the Ming and found artistic ruin and sterility. The sphere lost significance and they admired themselves. During their great period offshoots from their race had landed on another continent. After many wanderings some tribes settled on the highlands of Yucatán and Mexico. When the Ming were losing their conception these neo-mongols had a flourishing state. Through the strain of warfare they submitted the Chinese sphere to horizontal treatment much as the Semites had done. Their cruel nature and temperament supplied them with a stimulant, the vortex of destruction. Besides these highly developed peoples they lived on the world other races inhabiting Africa and the ocean islands. When we first knew them they were very near the Paleolithic stage, though they were not so much dependent upon animals their expenditure of energy was wide for they began to till the land and practice crafts rationally and they fell into a contemplation before their sex, the sight of their great energy, their convex maturity. They pulled the sphere lengthways and made the cylinder. This is the vortex of fecundity and it has left us the masterpieces that are known as love charms. The soil was hard, material difficult to win from nature, storms frequent as also fevers and other epidemics. They got frightened, this is the vortex of fear, its mass is the pointed cone, its masterpieces the fetishes, and we the moderns, Hepstein, Brancusi, Archipenco, Dunikowski, Modigliani and myself through the incessant struggle of the complex city have like ways to spend much energy. The knowledge of our civilisation embraces the world, we have mastered the elements, we have been influenced by what we liked most each according to his own individuality, we have crystallised the sphere into the cube, we have made a combination of all the possible shaped masses concentrating them to express our abstract thoughts of conscious superiority. Will and consciousness are our vortex. End of Part 12. End of Blast, Issue Number 1