The vortex and the cry: When london invented modern art

01When machines dreamed in colour

Picture London in 1914: a city where electric trams still jostled with horse-drawn carriages, where factories belched black smoke over working-class neighbourhoods, where the first skyscrapers began to pierce the fog. It was in this landscape of steel and soot that vorticism was born, with one obsession—to translate the raw energy of modernity into painting. Unlike the Italian futurists, who celebrated speed with lyricism, the English vorticists chose a colder, almost surgical approach. Their canvases resembled engineers’ blueprints—geometric compositions where human forms were reduced to assemblages of triangles and cylinders.

Take Lewis’s The Crowd, that monumental painting where dehumanised figures spiral around a central void. It looks like a mad machine that has swallowed human beings only to spit them out as cogs and gears. The colours are austere—black, white, grey, with a few splashes of blood red—as if the artist had set out to paint the very soul of the industrial city. "The artist is not a sentimentalist," Lewis declared. And indeed, there is nothing tender in these compositions, where everything seems on the verge of explosion.

02The duel that shook the avant-garde

12 June 1914 would go down in history as the day vorticism declared war on futurism. That evening, at the London Coliseum, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti delivered a lecture on Italian futurism. In the audience, a man with a piercing gaze and a meticulously groomed moustache listened with growing irritation. Wyndham Lewis had no intention of letting what he saw as a sham go unchallenged. When Marinetti finished his fiery speech on the beauty of war and speed, Lewis stood up and said in an icy voice, "Your movement is nothing but a circus of noise. We, the vorticists, create forms that will endure."

What followed resembled a scene from a western: Marinetti’s supporters shouted, the vorticists retaliated, and soon a full-blown brawl erupted in the Coliseum’s corridors. Ezra Pound, who had funded the vorticist manifesto, tried to calm things down by handing out copies of Blast to bewildered spectators. "Read this—it’s the future," he told them, brandishing the magazine with its shocking pink paper.

This confrontation revealed the very essence of vorticism: a British response to futurism, but also a radical critique of its emotionalism. Where Marinetti hailed war as "the world’s hygiene," Lewis and his companions saw geometric abstraction as a way to channel modernity’s destructive energy. Their vortex was not a chaotic whirlwind but a point of concentration—"the point of maximum energy," as Pound defined it.

03The studio where art became a machine

The Rebel Art Centre, located at 38 Great Ormond Street, was more than just a studio—it was a laboratory where art was transformed into science. In this former bourgeois house, Lewis had created a space where abstract paintings hung alongside Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures and William Roberts’s engravings. The air was thick with the smell of turpentine and tobacco, while the walls vibrated with heated debates about the future of art.

It was here that Lewis painted Workshop, a canvas that encapsulates the vorticist aesthetic. Geometric forms interlock like puzzle pieces, with touches of red and blue floating in space. What strikes the viewer is the almost mechanical precision of the lines—every stroke seems ruled, every shape cut with a scalpel. "I want my paintings to look like architects’ plans," Lewis said. And indeed, it almost resembles a blueprint for a machine yet to be invented.

Beside him, David Bomberg worked in a more organic, almost expressionist style. His Mud Bath is an explosion of colour—red figures standing out against a blue and white background, like flames dancing in the night. Unlike Lewis, Bomberg wasn’t trying to intellectualise his art. "I paint what I feel, not what I think," he said. This fundamental difference would soon drive them apart: while Lewis saw vorticism as a doctrine to follow, Bomberg saw it merely as a stage in his artistic evolution.

04The cry that echoed through the war

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, vorticism seemed doomed before it had even properly existed. Yet it was precisely in the trenches that the movement would find its most tragic dimension. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the young prodigy of vorticist sculpture, died in combat in 1915 at the age of 23. His last letter, written days before his death, was a manifesto in itself: "War is a terrible thing, but it shows us the beauty of struggle. Art must be like that—violent, pure, uncompromising."

Lewis survived the war but emerged profoundly changed. His paintings grew darker, more tormented. A Battery Shelled, painted in 1919, depicts soldiers reduced to ghostly silhouettes in a devastated landscape. The vortex had vanished, replaced by an apocalyptic vision of modernity. "The war destroyed everything, including our illusions," he wrote in his memoirs.

Bomberg, for his part, returned from the front traumatised. His post-war paintings lost their vital energy, becoming more figurative, almost melancholic. "Vorticism was a youthful mistake," he declared in 1920. "Art must speak of life, not machines." This statement sounded the death knell for the movement: in just a few years, what had been an artistic revolution had turned into a painful memory.

05The invisible legacy of the vorticists

Yet despite its brevity, vorticism left an indelible mark on 20th-century art. Its traces can be found in Henry Moore’s abstract sculptures, in Bridget Riley’s geometric paintings, and even in Richard Hamilton’s pop art. "Without vorticism, British art would have remained a province of impressionism," writes historian Richard Cork. "Lewis and Bomberg opened a breach that was never truly closed."

What still fascinates today is how this movement tried to capture the very essence of modernity. Their paintings do not depict objects or landscapes but forces—the energy of machines, the speed of cities, the violence of history. "We do not paint what we see, but what we feel," Lewis said. And indeed, when you look at The Crowd or Mud Bath, you don’t see forms but pure emotions—fear, excitement, anger, alienation.

Today, these paintings seem almost prophetic. In a world where machines dominate our daily lives, where social media creates virtual crowds, where speed has become a religion, vorticism appears as a mirror held up to our time. "They saw the future coming before anyone else," writes contemporary artist Antony Gormley. "And they tried to warn us."

06Gaudier-Brzeska’s last painting

There is a photograph taken in 1915, a few weeks before Gaudier-Brzeska’s death. It shows the young sculptor in his studio, surrounded by his works. In the foreground, a stone sculpture depicts a stylised human head, its angular features seemingly chiselled with a hatchet. It was his final masterpiece, a piece he would not live to finish.

This sculpture, titled Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, embodies the spirit of vorticism: at once primitive and modern, organic and mechanical, human and abstract. Gaudier-Brzeska carved it as if he sensed his impending end—with an urgency, an intensity that shows in every chisel mark.

Today, this work has disappeared. No one knows what became of it—perhaps destroyed in the war, perhaps hidden in a private collection. But its absence has itself become a metaphor for what vorticism was: a fleeting, almost ghostly movement that streaked across art history like a comet before vanishing into the night.

Yet if you listen closely in the galleries of Tate Britain, where Lewis’s and Bomberg’s paintings hang, you might still hear the echo of that cry from 1914. A cry that said: "Art must change, or die." And which, a century later, still resonates with unsettling relevance.