About Blast

Blast

Blast was the short-lived literary magazine of Vorticism, the London-based modernist art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. Only two editions ever appeared: the first on 2 July 1914, dated 20 June 1914 but delayed in publication, and the second on 15 July 1915. Both editions were written primarily by Lewis himself, and the magazine came to be recognised as a seminal text of pre-war twentieth-century modernism and as the most emblematic publication of the modern art movement in England. It originally cost two shillings and sixpence.

Despite a life of barely a year, Blast has been reprinted repeatedly and is held in major public collections. Its reputation rests on the ferocity of its opening manifesto, its bold experimental typography and its role in declaring that British art could generate its own avant-garde rather than simply import one from continental Europe.

Origins in the quarrel with Futurism

Blast grew out of a public falling-out with Italian Futurism. When the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti visited London in 1910, his lectures electrified the assembled avant-garde, and an exhibition of Futurist art at the Sackville Gallery in 1912 brought the movement squarely into the popular imagination. Lewis, initially galvanised by Marinetti's energy, became increasingly irritated by his arrogance.

The break came in June 1914, when the English Futurist manifesto Vital English Art appeared in The Observer, co-written by Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson. Lewis found his own name, among others, added as a signatory without permission, in an attempt to assimilate the English avant-garde into Marinetti's movement. On 12 June 1914, Lewis, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth and others loudly interrupted a recitation of the manifesto and a performance of Marinetti's poem The Battle of Adrianople, jeering and shouting. Lewis wrote a few days later that England had practically invented the civilisation Marinetti had come to preach about.

A movement and a name

The final riposte was Blast itself, written and illustrated by a group of artists assembled by Lewis from what he described as 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 projected magazine in ambiguous terms as mostly a painters' magazine, with himself to supply 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.

Vorticism itself was partially inspired by Cubism and favoured a geometric style tending towards hard-edged abstraction over familiar forms of representational art. Its paintings emphasised modern life through bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas, while its sculpture created energy and intensity through direct carving. Pound characterised the vortex as a radiant node or cluster from which, through which and into which ideas were constantly rushing.

The first issue and its design

The first edition was printed in folio format, with the oblique title Blast splashed across a bright pink soft cover, which Pound called the great magenta-covered opusculus. Inside, Lewis used a range of bold typographic innovations, reminiscent of Marinetti's concrete poetry, with some text set in sans-serif grotesque fonts rather than conventional serif type. The magazine was subtitled the Review of the Great English Vortex.

Blast 1 was edited and largely written by Lewis, with contributions from Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Spencer Gore, Wadsworth and Rebecca West, whose story Indissoluble Matrimony appeared in its pages. It also included an extract from Ford Madox Hueffer's novel The Saddest Story, better known by its later title The Good Soldier, published under his subsequent name Ford Madox Ford. Illustrations in the Vorticist style by Epstein, Wadsworth, Lewis and others included some of the first abstract paintings produced by British artists.

The manifesto: Blast and Bless

The opening twenty pages of the first issue contained the Vorticist manifesto, written by Lewis and signed by Lewis, Wadsworth, Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr and Gaudier-Brzeska. Epstein chose not to sign, although his work was featured. The manifesto's most remarkable feature was its long lists of things to be blasted and blessed, under the reiterated headings BLAST, CURSE and BLESS.

Among the targets of its execrations were the Britannic aesthete, described as the cream of the snobbish earth, and the years 1837 to 1900. Among the blessed were the vast planetary abstraction of the ocean and the hairdresser, blessed for correcting the grotesque anachronisms of the human physique. Henry Tonks, the Slade Professor of Fine Art, had the unique honour of being both blessed and blasted. The issue also contained a positive critique of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, an exhortation to suffragettes not to destroy works of art, a review of a London exhibition of Expressionist woodcuts, and Lewis's play Enemy of the Stars, the movement's most characteristic literary manifestation.

Reception

The English press was unimpressed by Blast, finding the literary contributions dull and the artwork and typography a pale imitation of the Futurist style. Marinetti, writing to Harold Monro, said he took the negative reviews as a victory for Futurism, but regretted that there had not instead been a collaboration with the Vorticists in the fight against their great common enemy, attachment to the past.

The second issue and the war

The second edition, the War Number, appeared in July 1915. It contained a short play by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's poems Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. An article by Gaudier-Brzeska entitled Vortex, written from the trenches, further described the Vorticist aesthetic; it was written while he was fighting in the First World War, only a few weeks before he was killed there.

Thirty-three days after Blast 1 was published, war was declared on Germany, and the First World War destroyed Vorticism. Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E. Hulme were both killed at the front, and David Bomberg lost his faith in modernism. Lewis was mobilised in 1916, initially fighting in France as an artillery officer and later working as a war artist for the Canadian Government. The Vorticists held an exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915, but the movement did not survive the war.

Attempted revival

Lewis tried to re-invigorate the avant-garde after the war, writing to a friend that he intended to publish a third edition of Blast in November 1919. He organised an exhibition of avant-garde artists called Group X at Heal's Gallery in March and April 1920, and later published a new magazine, The Tyro, of which only two issues appeared. The further issue of Blast never materialised, and neither venture achieved the momentum of his pre-war efforts. As the art historian Richard Cork has written, by 1920 even Lewis was obliged to admit that the movement was dead, as the whole context of pre-war experimentation had been dispersed by the destructive power of mechanised warfare.

Legacy and reprints

Both editions of Blast have been reprinted a number of times, including facsimile editions by Black Sparrow Press in 1982 and Thames and Hudson in 2009, and a Spanish semi-facsimile edition published by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid in 2010 alongside its exhibition Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held the exhibition The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18 from September 2010 to January 2011. Original copies are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Yale University, Wake Forest University, the University of Delaware, Chelsea College and the University of Exeter Special Collections, among others. The magazine is also available as a public-domain audiobook, a measure of how completely a two-issue magazine has entered the canon of modernism.

Place in British publishing

Blast stands as the defining example of the British little magazine as manifesto. Where other periodicals built audiences over decades, Blast made its entire argument in two large, pink-covered issues, announcing a movement, naming its enemies and allies, and showcasing its art and writing in a single typographic assault. Its brevity was not a failure of stamina so much as a consequence of history: the war that began weeks after its launch killed its contributors and scattered its circle. What remained was a complete, self-contained statement of pre-war British modernism, which is why scholars continue to treat this London magazine of 1914 and 1915 as one of the essential documents of twentieth-century art and literature.