Vorticism

The Rebel Art Centre was founded by Wyndham Lewis in London in March 1914 as a meeting place for artists to discuss revolutionary ideas and teach non-representational art

Group X was a short lived group of British artists formed by Wyndham Lewis in 1920 to provide a continuing focus for avant-garde art in Britain following the First World War

Futurism was an Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism and energy of the modern world

The London group was an exhibiting group founded in 1913 to organise modern art exhibitions in Britain

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Possibly the best known item that the Vorticists produced is their journal BLAST, in June 1914 just before the beginning of the First World War.

The short-lived Vorticist movement was often seen as a predominantly masculine, muscular affair, but as one of the descendents of the group of female painters of the period reveals, their work was equally compelling and innovative – and deserves to be better known today

The British avant-garde group was formed in London in 1914 by the artist, writer and polemicist Wyndham Lewis. Their idea, according to their manifesto BLAST, was to produce ‘a new living abstraction’ that expressed their sense of the dynamism of the modern world. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was an important figure in the movement. With the support of Tate Members, Tate recently acquired one of the artist’s sketchbooks from this period. Here, the curator of Tate Britain’s The Vorticists takes a close look at this extraordinary and rare item, and finds many parallels in Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture.