Our Little Gang: The Lives of the Vorticists

King (Paul Nash), a professor emeritus of English at McMaster University, centers this comprehensive history of vorticism, a short-lived avant-garde art movement formed in England in 1913, on the intertwined lives of its major players. He highlights David Bomberg, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Breska, Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, and Edward Wadsworth, all of whom had roots in the Slade School of Fine Art and were driven by desire, poverty, or discrimination to rebel against the complacencies of English art and society. With vorticism, they aimed to capture a point of “stillness” at the heart of modernity, drawing influence from cubism’s geometric shapes and perspective and the speed that futurism aimed to capture. King covers how the movement took shape at the Rebel Art Centre in London; was promoted by Blast, the vorticists’ magazine; and was beset by internal and external rivalries (Lewis, a misogynist who believed women were incapable of becoming “true revolutionaries,” harbored particular disdain for Saunders and Dismorr). WWI supplanted the metaphorical stillness of the vortex with chaos, eventually curtailing the movement in 1915, though King also discusses his subjects’ work after the war (including Saunders’s Still Life, which marked a return to representational art). Drawing on archival materials, the author scrupulously—if a bit dryly—captures the volatile sociopolitical moment that birthed vorticism and eventually killed it. Art history scholars will find much to appreciate. (July)