Wadsworth, Edward Alexander (1889–1949)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kitty Hudson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
English Abstract ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Abstract Group ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Individual Style

Edward Wadsworth played an important role alongside Wyndham Lewis in the short-lived avant-garde movement of Vorticism in 1913–1914. He continued to work in the abstracted, geometric style associated with the movement throughout World War I, though very little work of this period remains other than his woodcuts. After returning to England from active service in 1917, Wadsworth worked on the camouflage of shipping, known as "dazzle painting," and produced a large canvas entitled Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). The 1920s saw Wadsworth turn to the theme for which he is best known: the precise and realistic harbor scenes and maritime still lifes, largely painted in tempera. This highly individual style was often dubbed "surrealist" though Wadsworth did not encourage this association. His compositions became progressively more abstract in the early 1930s and, in 1933, Wadsworth joined the English abstract group "Unit One"; however, the following year he abruptly returned to his familiar marine paintings. Large-scale commissions included paintings for the smoke rooms of the Cunard ship Queen Mary and, during the 1939–1945 war, he produced advertising images for ICI. After 1945 his work tended once again towards the abstract, though always maintaining a link with earlier natural motifs and geometric forms.

Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 40-80
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Physical Structure ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Architectural Modernism

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”

Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Watling
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
World War ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
International Exhibitions ◽  
Blaue Reiter

The Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon [First German Autumn Salon] was one of the most important large-scale international exhibitions of Modern art to be shown in Germany before World War I. Staged in derelict rooms on Berlin’s Potsdamer Strasse between 20 September and 1 December 1913, the exhibition included over 360 works by some 90 artists. It was organized by the Berlin writer and critic Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) under the banner of his Der Sturm Gallery, working in collaboration with a group of Expressionist artists including Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke and Franz Marc, known by their collective name Der Blaue Reiter. The exhibition’s title was taken from the Salon d’automne, an annual display of avant-garde art which had taken place in Paris since 1903. Many in Germany—in particular the Blaue Reiter artists—increasingly felt that the development of modern art was no longer being adequately represented by these Paris shows. As Walden wrote in his foreword to the catalogue, the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon sought to "give an overview of the new movements in the pictorial arts of all countries," that would "at the same time…broaden our view of the contemporary."

Vorticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Von Cannon
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Maximum Energy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Geometric Shape ◽  
National Character ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound began the British avant-garde literary and visual arts movement known as Vorticism. In addition to Lewis and Pound, its members included writers and artists such as Richard Aldington, Lawrence Atkinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Edward Wasworth. David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were also associated with the group. Responding to Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, the passéism of the British national character, and the rise of World War I, Vorticists produced artwork that emphasized geometric shape, hardness, motion, and power. Pound, who coined the term "vorticism," referred to the "vortex" as "the point of maximum energy." By depicting abstract motion and acceleration, they saw themselves as reacting specifically to French Cubism’s reliance on the material world and the speed-fetishism of F.T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. Marinetti’s understanding of movement relied on actual machines—cars, airplanes, etc.—whereas other Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni, sought to explore the interior and exterior sensation of speed by combining abstract and concrete detail. The Vorticist competition with the Futurists was also part of their nationalistic avant-garde campaign. In contrast to what they saw as a reactionary and outdated British literature, Vorticists stressed individuality, attentiveness, and aggression in order to champion a new, modern British nation. Lewis introduced many of these ideas in the short-lived but highly influential magazine, Blast. The Vorticist movement itself disbanded in the early years of World War I.

Rodker, John (1894–1955)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Menmuir
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
East End ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants into Britain, John Rodker was born in Manchester on 18 December 1894 and subsequently raised in London from age six. A close friend of David Bomberg and Isaac Rosenberg (known widely as ‘The Whitechapel Boys’), he was schooled and encultured by the East End Jewish community in London, the context of which—politically vibrant, socially and culturally mixed, confrontational and embattled—shaped his literary and personal genius. Writing shortly before, during and after World War I, his work—essays, prose, poetry and translations—appeared in avant-garde and ‘little magazines’ such as The Egoist and New Freewoman, The Dial and The Little Review, and was appreciated and assessed by major figures of canonical modernism such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.

scholarly journals Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 318-336
Author(s):  
Ana Parejo Vadillo
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Landscape

This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s, and suggest that his stance against realism politicized his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism.

World War I Conscription and Social Change in Guinea

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Summers ◽  
R. W. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
Social Grouping ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Individual

When the French government introduced military conscription into the A.O.F. in 1912, the Guinean colonial authorities saw the measure as a means of training a local administrative corps to replace the traditional chieftaincy, through whose military defeat the conquest of Guinea had very largely been effected. However, the chiefs had by no means disappeared by 1914, and wartime demands for recruits were too massive to be supplied without their assistance. Their help was bought with promises to consolidate their authority in peacetime. Although able to marshal recruits, the chiefs seem to have been unable to prevent large-scale desertions before the moment of embarkation for France; village populations could also avoid conscription by overland migration out of the A.O.F. The colonial authorities therefore felt constrained to offer substantial inducements, mainly concerning improved social status vis-à-vis the chiefs, to the individual recruits. These contradictory policies were compounded by the recruitment drive of Blaise Diagne in 1918, which involved a further promise to recruits of improved status vis-à-vis the French authorities. The return of ancien combattants to Guinea was marked by outbreaks of strike action among workers in Conakry and along the railway line; by riots in demobilization camps; and by rejection of or agitation against chiefly power in the home cantons to which they dispersed. The anciens combattants did not form a coherent or organized political movement, but remained a conspicuous social grouping between the wars. Although they appear to have been strongly influenced by their experience of war and by contact with French socialists, their conflict with the chiefs seems to have counted for more with them than any confrontation with the French.

The Rites of Spring

Nancy Cunard ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 103-120
Author(s):  
Jane Marcus
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Creation Myths ◽  
Rite Of Spring

The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Grosz

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

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