vorticist lewis / vorticist poundby
Douglas Messerli
“Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First
Machine Age,” an exhibition organized by Richard Cork. Davis and Long, 746
Madison Avenue, New York, April 1977
Richard
Cork Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976, 1977), two volumes
While
Richard Cork’s comprehensive and illuminating book, Vorticism and Abstract
Art in the First Machine Age, his ensuing show of the same title at Davis
and Long gallery in April 1977, and the several articles and reviews
accompanying these have helped to rekindle an awareness of Vorticism as a
fascinating and vital art movement, many issues of Vorticist theory have yet to
fully be examined; and no issue has been more glossed over than the ideological
opposition of Vorticism’s major theorists, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.
The reasons for this are many and somewhat
complex. Vorticism, although named by Pound, is difficult as a visual art for
the literary critic to discuss. The language of the art is here just similar
enough to literature that it is tempting for the comparativist to make
metaphorical connections rather than analogous ones, and even the analogies
must too often be superficial. Pound knew little of art, especially painting;
in at least two reviews he wrote, Pound admits his ignorance: writing in The
Egoist in 1914, he notes: "It is much more difficult to speak of painting.
It is perhaps further from one’s literary habit, or it is perhaps so close to
one’s poetic habit of creation that prose is ill gone to fit it.” When he spoke
of art, accordingly, he chose primarily literary terms. Even when discussing
sculpture, to which he was innately more sensitive, Pound quickly shifted from
an art critical language to a literary one, seemingly interchanging the terms
of both. And when he was aware of distinctions, as in much of Gaudier-Brzeska
and in the two issues of Blast, in an attempt to be inclusive Pound described a
theory that remains abstract.
As Cork and others have perceived,
moreover, the theory of Vorticism was often purposefully abstract. The English
Cubists, as they had been called, seized upon Pound’s epithet, not only to
differentiate themselves from what they often misunderstood of Cubist and
Futurist doctrines, but also for purposes of creating personae and publicity,
and out of what might almost be described as a “nationalistic” desire to create
a new and vital English art. Thus, although the famed puce-colored first issue
of Blast was well stocked with manifesto-like statements, taken together these
present—contrary to Lewis’ later assertion—little of a sound art doctrine in
the manner of Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme or Apollinaire’s Le
Peintres cubists. With the Vorticist emphasis on personality, however, this
lack of a unified theory should come as no surprise—indeed, perhaps more than
anything else, the disparity of the members of this movement (the first issue
of Blast included work by non-Vorticists Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca
West) assured its short life.
If the statements expressed in the first
issue of Blast in June 1914 seem to be based on vague aesthetic and art
critical theories, perhaps it should be recognized that the authors of those
statements, who came together in the Spring of 1914 at Lewis’ studio, had had
very little time to develop a coherent ideological stance. Lewis, it is true,
in the years just prior, had established himself in the eyes of the public as a
literary rebel for the cause of the new art; but the reasons behind his
rebellion were not always theoretical. And since Lewis publicly expressed
little theory in Blast, we have only a vague context from which to understand
his acts. Hence, the art history is crucial.
In 1910 Douglas Goldring had printed in The
Tramp a letter by the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti entitled “Futurist
Venice,” a document which helped to open English painting to the influences of
non-representational art. In March and April of that year Marinetti lectured in
London at the Lyceum Club, and in November Roger Fry presented the first
“Post-Impressionist Exhibition” (the exhibition, which was actually titled
“Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” was held at the Grafton Galleries from
November 8, 1910, through January 15, 1911), which gave the English public its
first glimpse of more advanced styles of contemporary painting. Yet the art
exhibited at this show was obviously not that avant-garde. The most “advanced”
painting in the show was Picasso’s early Cubist work, Portrait of Clovis Sagot,
and other artists represented were primarily of another era: Cézanne, Derain,
Gauguin, Van Gogh, Redon, Matisse, and Seurat. In other words, as of February
1912, when Roger Fry wrote Lewis inviting him to become a member of the Omega
Workshop, Lewis had had little direct confrontation with Cubism, and Futurism
must have been an even more remote art. The situation was to change somewhat in
March 1912 when the Futurists showed at the Sackville Gallery; and the second
“Post-Impressionist Exhibition” of October 1912 included works by Braque and
Picasso which were more representative of Cubist art. Still, no exhibition in
England was entirely devoted to Cubist art until 1914. By July 1913, when the
Omega Workshop opened, Lewis—while certainly influenced by the new styles—had
had little time to assimilate them. As William Lipke points out, however, the
Omega Workshop, with its emphasis on decorative pattern and motif, gave Lewis
and his friends, men like Frederick Etchells and David Bromberg, an opportunity
to experiment with form (Lipke, Apollo [March 1970]). Fry was exploring,
moreover, his own theories of form; in 1913 he wrote:
“I’m continuing my aesthetic theories and
I have been attacking poetry to understand painting. I want to find out what
the function of content is, and am developing a theory that…[content] is merely
derivative of form and that all the essential aesthetic quality has to do with
form.” (Virginia Woolf, quoting Fry in Roger Fry: A Biography)
Lewis, brilliant synthesizer that he was,
could not but have been influenced by such ideas. Simultaneously he must have
been developing new theories of his own, applying techniques that he had
developed at Omega along with what he had learned from the Futurists and
Cubists. By October, Lewis and his future Vorticist friends were ready for a
break; they left Fry, ostensibly in anger over Fry’s appropriation of a
commission for Omega which belonged to Lewis and Spencer Gore. But, as Cork,
Lipke, and others have indicated, there were reasons underneath:
They “broke away because Roger Fry did not
want to, and could not satisfy their wish for personal distinction, anonymity
being a basic principle of workshops founded to serve a community ideal."
(N. Pevsner, as quoted by Lipke)
This idea is supported to a degree by a
“Round Robin” letter which Lewis and his friends sent to the press. A public
stir resulted, and attention was brought to bear on Lewis and the future
Vorticists. In that letter Lewis and others attacked Fry, as one would expect,
not only for appropriating the commission but on grounds of his and Omega’s
artistic taste. This attack, perhaps more than any document of the time,
indicates not so much Fry and Omega’s sensibility, but what Lewis and his
friends stood in opposition to in art:
As to its tendencies in Art, they alone
would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to
long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its
mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin is “greenery-yallery….” (Lewis,
ed. by W. K. Rose, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis).
Meanwhile, Lewis had obviously decided to
go public in other ways. By November 17 he clearly felt that it was time to
make known—if not his theory—at least his opposition to Futurist art, and that
night, at Marinetti’s second London lecture held at Hulme’s Poet’s Club, Lewis,
Gaudier, Edward Wadsworth, and Hulme heckled the Futurist; they
“counter-putsched,” as Lewis later describe it, “worsting” the “Italian
intruder” at his lecture stand where he stood “entrenched” (quote from Lewis, Blasting
and Bombarding).
Yet, as late as January 1914, when Lewis
went to find a publisher for Blast, he still spoke of the magazine as “a paper
somewhat in the lines of the Futurist manifesto” (Goldring, Odd Man Out).
And although on the evening the future Vorticists met, Lewis argued with C. R.
W. Nevison, probably over Futurism (Nevison, Paint and Prejudice), the
advertisements of April 1 and 15 in The Egoist suggest that, while Lewis had
won out as sole editor, a focus for the journal had not yet evolved.
Forthcoming was a manifesto, but of what was unclear. There were to be
discussions of “Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forms of Modern Art.”
“THE CUBE,” “THE PYRAMID” and the “END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA” were promised in
capital letters. But there was no mention of a Vortex or of a new art.
At what point Pound actually coalesced the
group by naming it is uncertain, but by July 15, 1914, the Vorticists were
ready to celebrate at a dinner party at the Dieudonné Restaurant, and five days
later Blast 1, “the great magenta cover’d oposulus,” as Pound described it, was
out. If Pound brought the group a unifying image, it now became evident that
Lewis was behind any unifying thought. The principles of the Manifesto, if one
takes a clue from the advertisement, were probably written prior to the
denomination of the Vortex image and demonstrate the vague and abstract
character of the movement in its early stages. However, once the vortex had
given the group a focus, some theoretical aesthetic principles were asserted.
If one finally sees evidence of a theory
behind Lewis’ previous actions, however, it is a theory still often
contradictory and unrefined. Certain statements were inevitable: “Blast
presents an art of Individuals,” Lewis writes in “Long Live the Vortex!” (Blast
1, p. 8); “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves,” begins
the Manifesto (p. 30). These statements and others like them make it clear that
from the beginning Vorticism was a vehicle for publicity, which Lewis later
made even clearer: “Vorticism…was what I, personally, did, and said at a
certain period. This may be expanded into a certain theory regarding visual
art” (Lewis, from the preface to the 1936 Vorticist Exhibition catalogue for
the show at the Tate Gallery, London).
To expand these statements into a theory
is understandably more difficult. Perhaps two statements in part one of Lewis’
definitions of Vortex underlie all others. “Life is the Past and the Future,”
Lewis asserts; “The Present is Art” (Blast 1, p. 147). While these may appear
to be simplistic ideas, what they indicate about Lewis’ theory is extremely
important, for they present the context needed to comprehend not only his
theory but his Vorticist art.
What is immediately evident about these
statements is that Lewis has made the Kantian distinction between life and art.
But this separation is not the same as that made a decade or two earlier by the
aesthetes. Art is not, for Lewis, Wilde’s “fascinating lie,” but is reality.
And “the Artist’s OBJECTIVE is Reality,” he writes (p. 139). Reality for Lewis
is not naturalistic; it is not the reality of life. Rather, it is a reality
found only in art, in the abstract. Lewis had, in part, come to these ideas
through the works of Wilhelm Worringer, who in Formprobleme der Gotik proposed
three kinds of aesthetic men: “Der Primitive Mensch”—who perceiving himself in
a hostile universe created an abstract art—“Der Orientalische Mensch”—who
perfected the abstraction and moved to great order—and “Der Klassische
Mensch”—who, as Geoffrey Wagner has put it, “no longer tortured by perception,
no more at odds with nature…,” began “to enjoy life and artistically idealize
nature." Obviously, for Lewis the superior sense of aesthetics was to be
found in the Primitive and Oriental cultures, for “which art came to be an
“avoidance of life and a resentment of nature” (Geoffrey Wagner, “Wyndham Lewis
and the Vorticist Aesthetic,” in Journal of Aestehtics and Art Criticism).
One need not go to Worringer, however, for
sources, for Kandinsky’s Über dast Geistige in der Kunst was reviewed
and excerpted in the first issue of Blast, and it is quite evident that
Lewis, like Kandinsky, was seeking the spiritual in art and its abstractions.
Rather than an “imitation, and inherently unselective registering of
impressions,” Lewis is interested in indicating an object’s “spiritual weight”
(Blast 2, p. 25):
The
essence of an object is beyond and often in contradiction to its simple truth:
and literal rendering in the fundamental matter of arrangement and logic will
never hit the emotion intended by unintelligent imitation….It is always the
POSSIBILITIES in the object, the IMAGINATION, as we say, in the spectator, that
matters. Nature is of no importance.” (Blast 2, p. 25)
Nature had lost is importance, in Lewis’
thinking, because, as he would later express it, nature had been completely
internalized. Bergson and his popularizer, Spengler, had converted all of
nature into a mental state by claiming that time was human consciousness in
duration:
“Chairs
and tables, mountains and stars, are animated into a magnetic restlessness and
sensitiveness, and exist on the same vital terms as man. They are as it were
the lowest grade, the most sluggish of animals. All is alive: and, in that sense,
all is mental.” (Lewis, Time and Western Man)
In this manner, Lewis believed, modern man
had destroyed space:
“Dispersal
and transformation of a space-phenomenon into a time-phenomenon throughout
everything—that is the trick of this doctrine. Pattern with its temporal
multiplicity, and its chronologic depth, is to be substituted for the thing,
with its one time, and its spatial depth.” (Time and Western Man)
And, without space, man in time has no
tension with which he can define meaning. The present, Lewis asserts, can only
be revealed when it has become “Yesterday,” the past.
For Lewis then life is past and future,
not Bergsonian durée. And art—because it is utterly different from life—must be
the present. Yet, art cannot be duration. A few lines later in his Blast
definition Lewis makes this clear: “There is no Present—there is Past and
Future, and there is Art.” If Lewis
seems here to contradict his previous statement, it is only because once he has
established art as something that exists in a realm other than nature, he must
redefine it in terms other than time. This new definition of art is implicit in
his statement, for if art is not in time it is obviously something motionless
and dead in space; and this is precisely the reality which art, according to
Lewis, defines: in a world given over to flux, to duration, only art “is able
to confer the static on the objects it apprehends” (Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A
Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy). As Lewis expresses it, “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” (Blast 1, p. 147).
So for Lewis the value of the Vortex image
lay not primarily in its associations with energy (although Lewis obviously
recognized an energy in the tension between man and the static center of the
Vortex), but in the paradox that is visual representation of energy is
transformed into stasis:
“You
think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent
place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of
concentration, is the Vorticist.” (quoted in Violent Hunt, I Have This to
Say)
In Blast 1 Lewis expresses this
idea in a pun: “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.”
Looking back, then, it is easy to see why
Lewis so thoroughly took Futurism to task. While certainly Vorticism took much
from Futurism, especially its “proselytizing attitude,” and while there is
little doubt that Lewis was influenced by the likes of Carrà and Boccioni—both
of whom exhibited in the March 1912 Sackville show—Lewis’s Vorticism is an art
diametrically opposed to Futurism. The Futurists, with their emphasis on dynamism,
with their reliance upon what Lewis calls “the plastic and real,” and with
their subjugation to rhetoric were an anathema to Lewis. “AUTOMOBILISM
(Marinettism) bores us,” writes Lewis (Blast 1, p. 46). “The futurist is
a sensational mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.” In
Futurism Lewis sees that “Art merges in Life again everywhere.” “Everywhere
LIFE is said instead of ART” (Blast 1, p. 28).
Lewis’ reactions to Cubism, and especially
to Picasso, are more complex. Throughout Blast, but particularly in the
essay “Relativism and Picasso’s Latest Work,” Lewis debunks Picasso and Cubism.
The latest works which Lewis describes are clearly Picasso’s collages of
1911-1913, shown perhaps in the 1914 Cubist show. Against these “small structures
in cardboard, wood, zinc, glass, string, etc., tacked, sewn or stuck together,”
Lewis reacts: “Picasso has become a miniature naturalistic sculptor of the vast
natures-morte of modern life. Picasso has come out of the canvas and has
commenced to build up his own shadows against reality” (Blast 1, p.
139). “The imitate like children the large, unconscious, serious machines and
contrivances of modern life” (Blast 1, p. 140). In the second issue of Blast
the attack became broader, as Lewis found fault with Cubism for its link
with Impressionism: “Picasso through the whole of his ‘Cubist’ period has
always had for starting point in his creations, however abstract, his
studio-table with two apples and a mandolin, the portrait of a poet of his
acquaintance, or what not…. The great licence Cubism affords tempts the artist
to slip back into facile and sententious formulas, and escape invention” (Blast
2, p. 146). It is here, I suggest, that Lewis most displays his confusion
and demonstrates what the Vorticist theory lacked.
What Picasso’s new works actually
indicated was what we now call a shift from Analytical to Synthetic Cubism.
Synthetic Cubism represented a movement in the same direction towards which
Lewis was striving. Indeed, Picasso, Braque, and Gris were creating assemblages
that existed for their own sake. As Christopher expresses it, the artist,
through his inclusion of pieces of cloth, chair caning, or paper in the
painting, had “placed it [the painting] in the world of real objects where it
[had] its own existence as a relationship between real things, rather than as a
representation of a set of relationships in nature, which it [was] intended to
communicate in a more or less illusionistic manner” (Gray, Cubist Aesthetic
Theories). A statement by Braque in 1917 supports this:
“The
bits of glued paper, the imitation wood and other elements of the same sort,
which I have employed in some of my designs, are equally valid because of the
simplicity of these compositional facts, and for that reason have been confused
with illusion, of which they are the exact contrary. They too are simple facts,
but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the
justifications of a new spatial figuration.” (Braque, “Pensées et réflexions
sur la peinture,” Nord-sud)
Furthermore, these works by Picasso, in
pointing towards Synthetic Cubism—in indicating a shift from what Gray calls
“epistemological” to the “aesthetic” approach—manifested also a shift away from
an art in which the artist played the role of creator of a dynamic reality, to
an art in which “the picture [was] regarded as a synthesis of the artist’s a
priori ideas which is given concrete form in painting in order to take its
place as a part of the world of natural forms.” In other words, Lewis had
failed to see in Picasso the evidence of an art applicable to his own theory.
One
can only speculate on the reasons for Lewis’ failure of perception here, but I
suggest that the most obvious ones are implied by Lewis in the same essay on
Picasso:
“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.”
(Blast 1, p. 140)
I think one can perceive in such
statements that, despite his theoretical separation of art and nature, Lewis in
actuality has trouble responding to and creating a non-referential art. Lewis’
art is an intellectual interpretation of nature, an interpretation that focuses
and controls the time of man. In making art, in actually creating a new
combination of objects and forms, Picasso, in Lewis’ thinking, was merely
positing something which would exist in flux simultaneously with nature and
which, because it has no human reference, is dead even in terms of that. In
short, Lewis’ art, even when he turned to pure abstraction, continues to rely
upon man and time for its reference: although diametrically opposed to them,
his art of space is given meaning only insofar as it is separate from life, is
something distinct from man’s future and past. Thus Vorticism, as Lewis
theorized on it, is not a pure art—despite its obvious differences from
Futurism, Vorticism like the Italian movement is a literary art, an art which
relies on ideology rather than on a love of pure form. In the final evaluation,
it is an art as reliant on time as it is upon space. In Lewis’ Vorticism, forms
are not permitted to exist for their own sake but rather become emblems that
stand for man’s confrontation with life.
Surely, as Richard Cork has implied, the
didactic and proselytizing tone of Vorticism was not antithetical to Pound’s
nature; in 1912-13 he had fought almost as vociferously for the Image. But
Imagism had failed him because it had been misunderstood to be a poetry of
“visual” presentation. What Pound had meant by an Image was difficult to
express in literary terms. While the Image for Pound had always been associated
with precision and concreteness of visual presentation, what lay behind the
Image was an idea or an emotion, not a phenomenon in nature, not a naturalistic
fact. The year before Blast Pound had implied this in “The Serious
Artist”:
“The
serious artist is scientific in that he presents the image of his desire, of
his hate, of his indifference as precisely that, as precisely the image of his
own desire, hate or indifference.” (The Egoist)
His emphasis, however, had been
misconstrued. “Amygism”—as he was to describe what had happened to Imagism—was
too often a poetic which focused on objects in nature and rendered them
concretely. This was not what Pound meant. Art afforded him a better
vocabulary.
In Lewis’ hard-edge abstraction, Pound saw
what he meant by Image. Pound’s Image, like Lewis’ abstraction, was something
precise that yet stood for a complex of ideas: it did not come from nature but
from the mind of the artist. Rather than the artist being a “Toy of
circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impression,” Pound, like Lewis,
saw the artist “Directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as
Conceiving instead of merely observing and reflection” (Pound, “Vortex.
Pound," Blast 1, p. 153). Just as for Lewis, what Pound’s artist
did was in a realm other than nature.
For Pound, however, who after all dealing
with language, not with pure form, there is a more vital interrelationship
between nature and art—there is a flow between the two which is absent in
Lewis’ theories. Perhaps Pound’s best statement of this was published the year
after Blast, in “Affirmations”:
“The
Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then
“subjective.” External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are
drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike
themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some
external scene or action carries it intact in the mind; and that vortex purges
it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges
like the external original. In either case the Image is more than an idea. It
is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does
not fulfill these specifications, it is not what I mean by image.”
(“Affirmations [as for Imagisme]” in The New Age)
It is on the basis of these kinds of
statements that we must draw a line between the theories of Lewis and Pound.
Whereas Lewis’ art rejects nature in an attempt to interpret man’s time by
focusing it into space, Pound does not reject nature at all, but would make it
“new”: in Pound’s theory the mind of the artist in conjunction with nature
makes something else. This view is supported by Pound’s attempt to describe how
he came to write “In a Station at the Metro,” a description which appeared in
his Gaudier-Brzeska of 1916. His recounting of this process has been so often
reprinted that I will not do so here. The important thing to remember
concerning it is that Pound saw his short “hokku-like sentences” as a “pattern”
or an “abstraction” (“little splotches of colour”) in a specific impression,
and he viewed that “pattern” or “abstraction” as a record of an interchange
between nature and the mind, as an instant “when a thing outward and objective
transform[ed] itself, or dart[ed] into a thing inward and subjective.”
What is implicit in these comments is that
Pound understood nature and art to be in a dynamic relationship. He stresses,
accordingly, the energy of the vortex, not the stasis at its center:
“All
experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized 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-ENERGIZED FUTURE. (Blast
1, p. 153)
For Pound, “The vortex is the point of
maximum energy,” but that energy is not transformed into space; it is not
Lewis’ stillness. Hence Pound criticizes Futurism not because of its dynamism,
but because of its “disgorging spray,” its “dispersal” of energy. Cubism,
however, is not attacked; indeed, Picasso is named as the father of the Vortex
(Kandinsky as its mother). Somehow, Pound and Lewis—perhaps even
unknowingly—had split along the way in terms of theory.
One can attribute this split in part to
the obvious element that such statements of Pound betray; Pound has an unswerving
faith in a space-time continuum. It is immediately tempting to connect this
with Apollinaire’s “fourth dimension” as described in Le peintres cubists
of 1913, and in turn to relate that to Einstein’s Special Theory of
Relativity of 1905 and to Minkowski’s formulation of the space-time
continuum in 1908. But, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson (in her essay “A New Facet
on Cubism: ‘The Fourth Dimension” and ‘Non-Euclidean Geometry’ Reinterpreted,” Art
Quarterly, No. 4 [Winter 1971]) has convincingly argued, the Analytical
Cubists most certainly did not have knowledge of these developments in physics
and were more influenced by Riemann and Poincaré’s theories on non-Euclidean
geometry. And as we have seen, Lewis and his Vorticist friends had not been
part of a milieu from which they could have gleaned even that. It is possible
that Lewis had read Apollinaire prior to Blast, for in his statements on
Vortex, Lewis attacks what he calls a “fourth quantity” made up of the Past,
the Future and Art (Blast 1, p. 148), but in Pound’s writings there is
no mention of any of these names or concepts.
Ironically, Pound arrived at some of his
ideas of space and time, I suggest, through Lewis’ panacea for all the evils of
the age—Henri Bergson. In December 1913 The New Freewoman—a magazine for
which Pound was writing at that time and which the next year was to become The
Egoist—published a selection from Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice
entitled “The Philosophy of Ideas.” This essay considers the problem of man’s
perception of movement or evolutionary transition in a world where all is
experienced as durée. According to Bergson, the problem is that, although man
is sensible to the reality that the world is in flux, in a state of becoming,
“the intelligible reality, that which ought to be, is more real still, and that
reality does not change.”
In other words, “Beneath the qualitative
becoming, beneath the evolutionary becoming, beneath the extensive becoming,
the mind must seek that which defines change, the definable quality, the form
of essence, the end.”
Thus, Bergson recognizes the paradox
inherent in man’s experience: that he is both a creature of becoming—of pure
flux—and of ideas—of something Immutable that seems to be in space. Bergson’s
solution is to consider becoming as working in the same way as a
cinematographic film, as “a movement hidden in the apparatus and whose function
it is to superpose the successive pictures on one another in order to imitate
the movement of the real object.” If one looks at reality in this manner,
argues Bergson, form becomes inseparable from becoming, which materializes its
flow: “Every form thus occupies space, as it occupies time.” And eternity comes
to underlie time as a reality.
Pound almost certainly read this essay; he
published an article on Ford Madox Ford in the same issue, and his “The Serious
Artist” had been serialized in the three issues previous. But even if he had
not read it, Bergson’s ideas had achieved popularity throughout Europe. In
fact, as Eugène Minkowski (the phenomenologist, not the physicist) points out, L’Évolution
créatrice—and this is especially evident in this selection—was written
partly in an attempt to counteract Bergson’s initial conception expressed in
Time and Free Will (1910), of time and space as dichotomous; Bergson was
reacting to the pressures which Einstein's and Minkowski’s theories of a
space-time continuum had brought to bear (Minkowski, Lived Time).
Even more telling is the fact that it is
impossible to read these words of Bergson without thinking of Pound’s
experiments with hokku and the Chinese ideogram and his reading—probably in the
same year—of the manuscript of Ernest Fenellosa. Other than serving as a
reminder that the Chinese ideogram, according to Fenellosa, was based on the
principle of superimposition of word-pictures, two short quotations from
Fenellosa will be sufficient to show the relationship of Pound’s Asian studies
to the cinematographical metaphor of Bergson.
“The thought-picture is not only called up
by these signs as well as words, but far more vividly and concretely. Legs
belong to all three characters: they are alive. The group holds something of
the quality of a continuous moving picture. One superiority of verbal poetry as
an art rests on its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese
poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once
with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds.”
The overlapping of ideas could not have
been missed by a reader as erudite as Pound. When Pound writes, then, that
“Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in
some primary form,” I believe we must understand him in Bergson’s terms. For
Pound, form is not to be posited as the essence of reality, as it is for Lewis,
but as a reality which, like Picasso’s collages, makes something new that
exists in contiguity with the artist’s time and space. Pound is not against
representation in art. As he was to write later in 1914: “The vorticist can
represent or not as he likes….A resemblance to natural forms is of no
consequence one way or the other (“Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist,” The Egoist).
It is not form that is stressed in Pound’s thinking, but the consciousness in
nature which from either subjective or objective stimuli finds a form which
expresses that stimuli as something new. As late as 1920 Pound was trying to
clarify this notion:
“I
tried in my early writings on vorticism to explain how an idea emerges in the
inventive mind, usually, if that inventive mind be an artist’s, in some form
more sensuous than word-form, in some form for which the word or word
combination is not already created.” (“Objectivity,” The Apple)
His
simple statement is a long way from Lewis’ claims that art as pure form is a
reality opposed to time and heedless of nature, and Pound was certainly not
unaware of this fact. Indeed, in the same essay published in The New
Freewoman, Bergson described the futility of trying to work within the
framework of the classical philosophy of ideas, a philosophy which he explains
in terms that come very close to Lewis’ conception of space and time and his
theory of Vorticist art. If Pound read this, as I suggest he must have, the
fact would not have been missed: Bergson was understandably among those
“blasted” in Blast.
One must ask, then, why Pound would give
his name to, and join a group of men led by someone whose theory was in the
long run quite at odds with his own. The answer is rather simple. First of all,
in such a short time neither Lewis nor Pound had yet had a chance to realize
fully their differences. As Cork notes, “Vorticism was never, even at its
inception, a closely-knit movement like Futurism.” What I have shown is seen
from the vantage-point of seven decades, but in 1914 the Vorticists’ theories
had not yet been fully expressed, even to themselves. Moreover, the two men did
have much in common: the belief in the artist as a serious creator who worked
on a level above the minds of most men, and an outspoken contempt for much art
and literature of the recent and often not-so-recent past. Both were
missionaries who found in Vorticism a name that would give attention to their
shared and their individual causes. Perhaps they never imaged that they needed
to share a unified theory. As Lewis later wrote of Pound and his relationship
to Vorticism:
“Ezra Pound attached himself to the Blast
Group. That group was composed of people all very “extremist” in their views.
In the matter of fine art, as distinct from literature, it was their policy to
admit no artist disposed to technical compromise, as they regarded it. What
struck them principally about Pound was that his fire-eating propagandist
utterances were not accompanied by any very experimental efforts in his
particular medium. His poetry, to the minds of the more fanatical of the group,
was a series of pastiches of old french or old italian poetry, and could lay no
claim to participate in the new burst of art in progress. Its novelty consisted
largely in the distance it went back, not forward; in archaism, not new creation.
That was how they regarded Pound’s literary contributions. But this certain
discrepancy between what Pound said— what he supported and held up as an
example—and what he did, was striking enough to impress itself on anybody.”
(Lewis, Time and Western Man)
Again, what Lewis most shows us here is
what he failed to understand in Picasso’s collages: that Pound was using the
past as Picasso had used the bits and pieces of cloth and glass from nature to
create something new which would exist simultaneously in time and space. Pound,
on his part, expressed the differences between himself and Lewis in a slightly
more philosophical manner: “The Vorticism movement is a movement of
individuals, for the protection of individuality. Humanity has been
interesting, more interesting than the rest of the animal kingdom because the
individual has been more easily discernible from the herd.” This emphatic
individualism is something that we must take into account when we discuss
Vorticism. Richard Cook’s excellent book and show have demonstrated this; but
both would have been strengthened if Cork had more fully investigated the
differences of theory which lay behind Vorticist art.
College
Park, Maryland, 1976
Reprinted
from The Art Quarterly (Metropolitan Museum of Art), I, Autumn 1978
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