Vorticism

vorticism (vôr`tĭsĭzəm), short-lived 20th-century art movement related to futurism. Its members sought to simplify forms into machinelike angularity. Its principal exponent was a French sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. The movement, however, had its largest following in England, where Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot wrote about it.

Bibliography

See W. C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 1910–1915 (1972).

---

Vorticism

Literary and artistic movement that flourished in England 1912–15. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, it attempted to relate art to industrialization. It opposed 19th-century sentimentality and extolled the energy of the machine and machine-made products, and it promoted something of a cult of sheer violence. In the visual arts, Vorticist compositions were abstract and sharp-planed, showing the influence of Cubism and Futurism. Artists involved in the movement included the poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor Jacob Epstein.