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Blast #1
Blast 1
paperback book
164 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 1914
7 people are currently reading
1119 people want to read
About the author
Wyndham Lewis
118 books162 followers(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).
After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.
The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.
After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.
The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.
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September 21, 2019
An incredible piece of hybrid art and literature. Way ahead of its time, but equally, capturing a paradoxically overlooked zeitgeist. Lewis (and others) ride the crest of early 20th-century revolution, in the ways that words can become art. Some of it is painfully boring. Some makes no sense. Some of it screams to be taken so seriously it becomes comedy, and elsewhere comedy is importantly serious. It is masculine, and it is purposeful. It is incredibly refreshing.
Below is an extract of my dissertation on the publication:
'Relationship as the ‘PRIMARY PIGMENT’; Lewis, Pound and the Formulating of BLAST 1
On July 2nd 1914, BLAST 1 was published, marking the solidification of the avant-garde Vorticist movement that had been swelling within London, waiting to burst onto the British artistic consciousness. Whilst the determination and aspirations of the movement were destroyed during the Great War, the two edition run of BLAST provided a new framework for the production of literary art, that rivalled the competing Continental literary movements. Filled with constant ambiguities, anxieties and conflicts, BLAST 1 illustrates the importance of ‘relationship’ in establishing this unique framework and aesthetic. Whilst the movement’s focus on a singular ‘Primary Pigment’ as the informing energy of art often disguises this reliance on ‘relationship’, the creation of interactions and rhythms between individual works, mediums and artists are integral to the magazines complexity and individuality both in intention and artistic effect. Edited mainly by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, BLAST 1’s use of ‘relationship’ is a result of their influence.
Victorian Homophobia
BLAST 1 did not, however, exist in a literary vacuum, and instead uses its relationships with its intellectual predecessors to determine its own unique voice. At the start of the twentieth century avant-garde art movements were being formed throughout Continental Europe, leading to an anxiety among the experimental and self-assertively revolutionary British artists, who became the ‘Vorticists’. They felt they were isolated outside of these new European developments and restricted by the Victorian traditions entrenched within British artistic institution. Thus, when BLAST 1 was published it contained a ‘Manifesto’ deriding England’s own history, and blasting England’s established ‘Dismal Symbol, Set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within’. This statement did not simply provide new ideals as an alternative to what had come before, but was actively antagonistic to the ‘effeminate’ nature of Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence. The ‘Manifesto’ goes on to ‘blast’ ‘SNOBBERY (disease of femininity)’ , using venomous vocabulary that applies morality onto aesthetic preferences. Within his autobiography, Lewis wrote that the ‘eunuchs and stylists’ described in BLAST 1 referred to ‘Wildeites’ and the ‘diabolics’ of Swinburne, and describes their work as ‘puerile literary debauchery’, confirming the target of the ‘Manifesto’s’ attacks. Miranda B. Hickman argues that BLAST, or at least those with the most influence over BLAST’s editorship, were engaging with the Victorian Aesthetic and Decadent movements in a homophobic discourse. By 1914 the public’s opinion on Decadent and Aesthetic writing was largely negative due to it’s association with Oscar Wilde and his highly-public trials of 1895; Laurel Blake attribute this general ‘sharpening of homophobia in metropolitan culture’ to the demise of the Aesthetic and Decadent publications coming before the modernist movement, that BLAST sat within. The ‘effeminacy’ BLAST refers to became a signal of this homosexual preoccupation; as Hickman writes, ‘newspaper reports surrounding [Wilde’s] trials crystallized what would become the dominant twentieth-century image of the “queer” male figure whose “effeminacy” implied a propensity for same-sex sexual relations.’ Yet, the Vorticist anxiety and agitation concerning their place as a successor to these ‘effeminate’ publications, imbues the ‘Manifesto’ with the characteristic aggressive tone that is key to the individuality of Vorticist propaganda. It relies on this conflict with its own influence for creative momentum, and crafts a statement around it.
The circumstances of BLAST 1’s publishing are particularly pertinent to this conflict; BLAST was published by The Bodley Head, under John Lane, who also published the Decadent The Yellow Book. It was a publication known for its association with Wilde through his friendship with many of its contributors and illustrators. Within BLAST 1, there is both a publisher’s advertisement for past editions of The Yellow Book, and Wilde’s The Sphinx; both feature a more delicate and feminine font than those found throughout the rest of the magazine. The juxtaposition of the advertisement at the end of the magazine, and the derision of what it advertises at the beginning, stimulates a dynamic of conflict, contextually effecting each piece of the work that lies between them. With the level of input Lewis and Pound had in collating and editing the magazine, it is unlikely they would not be aware of the presence of these adverts before printing, and their subsequent effects. The proximity of the magazines consumerist ties with the ‘effeminate’ literary past, to the actual theoretical literarily modernism published in it, emphasises the defining qualities (masculine and feminine) of each.
Opposition and Integration of Futurism
Wilde, the figurehead of ‘effeminacy’, is not only found in these advertisements. He is also referred to by name in ‘Long Live the Vortex’, with reference to the Italian Futurist movement;
Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of the machinery. Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense.’ The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.
Written by Lewis, this connects the Vorticists’ issue with Aestheticism with another major Vorticist inspiration, and precursor to BLAST: The Italian Futurist movement, spearheaded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The insult to Futurism is initially surprising considering the movements are very similar in intention; whilst it is clear that Lewis and Pound, championed British individuality, and held deep anxieties about Eurpoean influence, the Vorticists took heavy inspiration from the Italian Futurists.
The Italian movement had already begun to have an impact in British culture by 1914 through commentators and contributors such as Marinetti, who toured the capital giving speeches, readings and seminars. In 1913, whilst BLAST 1 was being devised, Lewis and Pound were known to have listened to a reading of Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, by Marinetti himself, at the Florence Restaurant in London. Like BLAST, Zang Tumb Tumb contained a re-inventive anarchy and bravado, that Marinetti called for in his Futurist Manifesto (1909); it defied audio convention, but perhaps more notably, it claimed to be ‘brutally destroying the syntax of speech’, therefore affecting the way it was visually presented on a page. As Alan Bartram translates:
‘The Futurist […] he wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations just as they come to him.’
Bartram claims that for the Futurists ‘only a clean sweep of all customary practices would do’, with the new advances in typographic equipment allowing experimentation in the printed form. After the war, Lewis was particularly insulting about the audio effects of this typographic and syntactical experimentation, writing of a performance by Marinetti;
My equanimity when first subjected to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to my Marinettian preparation- it seemed ‘all quiet’ to me by comparison.
Although this opinion was voiced after the war, its sentiment was one held prior to it, and was partially responsible for putting into motion Lewis’s formation of ‘Vorticism’; in particular, his determination to direct a truly British art, being created out of a constant hostility for the European movements. This hostility provoked Marinetti, who in 1914 published a manifesto named ‘Vital English Art’ alongside an English futurist C.R.W Nevison. This article contained a slanderous attack on the ‘New English Art Club’, the ‘seat of the ‘Great London Vortex’, an important creative hub for the Vorticist artists. In it, Marinetti and Nevison termed them ‘sham revolutionaries, who having destroyed the prestige of the Royal Academy, now [showed] themselves grossly hostile to the later movements of the advance guard.’ As Christopher Adams writes, ‘Nevison and Marinetti effectively presented the Rebel Art Centre as nothing more than an English outpost of the Italian Futurism, thereby denying it an independent identity and undermining Lewis’s leadership aspirations.’ Lewis described these disputes as artists forming ‘militant groups’ and the literary attacks they produced on each other, as well as physical alterations that occurred, as ‘putsches’. Again, like with the ‘Wildean’ past of the avant-garde magazine, this aggression and war-related metaphorical discourse was integral to the strength of BLAST 1’s individual masculine tone. This conflict bled into the relationship of inspiration BLAST’s visual nature had with the physical visual Futurist ‘concrete’ poetry, particularly Zang Tumb Tumb. Zang Tumb Tumb featured some extremely visually challenging literature, exemplifying the visual aspects of ‘concrete’ poetry; (fig. 1) is one such example. The passage describes a Turkish balloon, above the siege of Adrianopoli in the Balkan War, a battle Marinetti himself had witnessed. Words are literally suspended on the page, with the physical appearance of the balloon carved out with its own noun (Pallone). Through onomatopoeic visual signals (‘vibbbrrrrrrarrrre’) the balloon is shown to be amongst the ethereal messages sent by the wireless (TSF- Telegraphie sans fils), their ephemeral nature being shown by the black lines that fall away from them. These black lines exist in a difficult field between illustration and punctuation; they denote movement through the act of solidification and elongation. This reflects the Italian Futurist painters who would go on to represent such dynamic movement in a similar way for the next three decades. A preparatory sketch of Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (fig. 2), painted in 1913, depicts movement using the typical ‘force lines’ coming from the back of the bike. The aversion to this Futurist theory that came as the result of Lewis and Marinetti’s disagreements, paradoxically informed the Vorticist literary and artistic design. BLAST 1 is exemplary of this sentiment. Having seen and experienced the ‘concrete’ poetry of Marinetti and other contemporary Futurist works such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s L'Antitradition Futuriste, Manifeste Synthèse, the magazine’s editors were likely to have wanted to reproduce a similarly visually arresting typography, but without adhering to exactly same theoretical framework, and risking the accusation of complete Futurist influence. BLAST 1’s cover is an example of the result of this fear, featuring an onomatopoeic word without any obvious point of meaning or origin; it is suspended on the page in a such a way to defy typographic and syntactical convention. Although not strictly a poem like Zang Tumb Tumb, the cover and title still attacks the shared target of Futurism and Vorticism; Bartram argues the Futurists attacked ‘the prevailing and (in their view) decadent Classism and hedonistic Symbolism [opening] up the rectangular page to the dynamic organisation and asymmetry which is the basis of modernist design.’ By this logic the Vorticist did just the same, ‘blasting’ the classic with a non-linear design, and opening the page in a way that is reflected in the internal content of the Although Blast 1 does not have a consistently avant-garde attitude towards typography, it is exercised in select pieces. The initial ‘Manifesto’, (fig. 3) for example, appears similar in structure to L'Antitradition Futuriste, Manifeste Synthèse, but applies specific nuances borrowed from Marinetti along with effects specific to the English language. The first line of the first page gives a sense of the visual devices this section of the magazine uses to establish a unique authorial voice. ‘BLAST First (for politeness) England’- This sentence/line uses standard punctuation in conjunction with with font size and case to establish the ‘for politeness’ as a humorous aside, with the rest of the line not contingent to its meaning; the line becomes almost theatrical in the changing tone of authorial voice this allows. The second line, all in capitals, re-establishes an intention of seriousness: this is achieved through the strengthening of tone, via the re-implementation of all capital letters. These examples suggest that, although preaching a break from tradition, the first edition of BLAST relied upon pre-existing notions of grammar and punctuation much more than the Futurist poets. The third line of the same section of Blast does however use a visual paradigm more similar to Marinetti’s later experiments; a visual paradigm, created through a variation in size, font and case. By ‘trapping’ SET between punctuation (a comma) and a change in case it is emphatically ‘set’, with the form representing the immovability of the meaning. It seems to be a more visually (as opposed to syntactically) based way of creating poetic effect. Another line that takes Marinetti’s way of representing physical presence within text is the line ‘(A 1000 MILE LONG, 2 KILOMETER DEEP)’; this line takes up the entire breadth of the page, creating a physical divide, like the water creates in reality. By using lower case for the word deep, but still keeping the first letter capitalized, a further dimension of visual and physical space is added. Whilst still given the same importance as the word ‘LONG’ due to the capitalized first letter, the lowercase reflects a difference in meaning, which in turn reflects a difference in visual and physical space occupied and indicated by the word. The final indication of a Futurist relationship on the ‘Manifesto’s’ first page is the use of the line that bisects the bottom third of the page. Following the use of the line in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb to introduce dynamism, the line in this first section of BLAST 1 is used to establish the text next to it as a list. This would not be obvious, due to the previously lax adherence to conventional grammatical and syntactical rule; the line therefore becomes a heavily visual, quasi-punctuation with a kind of dynamism of its own, shown through it’s versatile use, as seen on the following page (fig. 4). Due to the strained Futurist relationship, BLAST 1 produces these more subtly subversive moments, that would have been more generally palatable to common audiences than the Futurist poetry; and arguably have a more enduring influence on the general use and presentation of text in a visual space. [.....]'
Below is an extract of my dissertation on the publication:
'Relationship as the ‘PRIMARY PIGMENT’; Lewis, Pound and the Formulating of BLAST 1
On July 2nd 1914, BLAST 1 was published, marking the solidification of the avant-garde Vorticist movement that had been swelling within London, waiting to burst onto the British artistic consciousness. Whilst the determination and aspirations of the movement were destroyed during the Great War, the two edition run of BLAST provided a new framework for the production of literary art, that rivalled the competing Continental literary movements. Filled with constant ambiguities, anxieties and conflicts, BLAST 1 illustrates the importance of ‘relationship’ in establishing this unique framework and aesthetic. Whilst the movement’s focus on a singular ‘Primary Pigment’ as the informing energy of art often disguises this reliance on ‘relationship’, the creation of interactions and rhythms between individual works, mediums and artists are integral to the magazines complexity and individuality both in intention and artistic effect. Edited mainly by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, BLAST 1’s use of ‘relationship’ is a result of their influence.
Victorian Homophobia
BLAST 1 did not, however, exist in a literary vacuum, and instead uses its relationships with its intellectual predecessors to determine its own unique voice. At the start of the twentieth century avant-garde art movements were being formed throughout Continental Europe, leading to an anxiety among the experimental and self-assertively revolutionary British artists, who became the ‘Vorticists’. They felt they were isolated outside of these new European developments and restricted by the Victorian traditions entrenched within British artistic institution. Thus, when BLAST 1 was published it contained a ‘Manifesto’ deriding England’s own history, and blasting England’s established ‘Dismal Symbol, Set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within’. This statement did not simply provide new ideals as an alternative to what had come before, but was actively antagonistic to the ‘effeminate’ nature of Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence. The ‘Manifesto’ goes on to ‘blast’ ‘SNOBBERY (disease of femininity)’ , using venomous vocabulary that applies morality onto aesthetic preferences. Within his autobiography, Lewis wrote that the ‘eunuchs and stylists’ described in BLAST 1 referred to ‘Wildeites’ and the ‘diabolics’ of Swinburne, and describes their work as ‘puerile literary debauchery’, confirming the target of the ‘Manifesto’s’ attacks. Miranda B. Hickman argues that BLAST, or at least those with the most influence over BLAST’s editorship, were engaging with the Victorian Aesthetic and Decadent movements in a homophobic discourse. By 1914 the public’s opinion on Decadent and Aesthetic writing was largely negative due to it’s association with Oscar Wilde and his highly-public trials of 1895; Laurel Blake attribute this general ‘sharpening of homophobia in metropolitan culture’ to the demise of the Aesthetic and Decadent publications coming before the modernist movement, that BLAST sat within. The ‘effeminacy’ BLAST refers to became a signal of this homosexual preoccupation; as Hickman writes, ‘newspaper reports surrounding [Wilde’s] trials crystallized what would become the dominant twentieth-century image of the “queer” male figure whose “effeminacy” implied a propensity for same-sex sexual relations.’ Yet, the Vorticist anxiety and agitation concerning their place as a successor to these ‘effeminate’ publications, imbues the ‘Manifesto’ with the characteristic aggressive tone that is key to the individuality of Vorticist propaganda. It relies on this conflict with its own influence for creative momentum, and crafts a statement around it.
The circumstances of BLAST 1’s publishing are particularly pertinent to this conflict; BLAST was published by The Bodley Head, under John Lane, who also published the Decadent The Yellow Book. It was a publication known for its association with Wilde through his friendship with many of its contributors and illustrators. Within BLAST 1, there is both a publisher’s advertisement for past editions of The Yellow Book, and Wilde’s The Sphinx; both feature a more delicate and feminine font than those found throughout the rest of the magazine. The juxtaposition of the advertisement at the end of the magazine, and the derision of what it advertises at the beginning, stimulates a dynamic of conflict, contextually effecting each piece of the work that lies between them. With the level of input Lewis and Pound had in collating and editing the magazine, it is unlikely they would not be aware of the presence of these adverts before printing, and their subsequent effects. The proximity of the magazines consumerist ties with the ‘effeminate’ literary past, to the actual theoretical literarily modernism published in it, emphasises the defining qualities (masculine and feminine) of each.
Opposition and Integration of Futurism
Wilde, the figurehead of ‘effeminacy’, is not only found in these advertisements. He is also referred to by name in ‘Long Live the Vortex’, with reference to the Italian Futurist movement;
Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of the machinery. Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense.’ The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.
Written by Lewis, this connects the Vorticists’ issue with Aestheticism with another major Vorticist inspiration, and precursor to BLAST: The Italian Futurist movement, spearheaded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The insult to Futurism is initially surprising considering the movements are very similar in intention; whilst it is clear that Lewis and Pound, championed British individuality, and held deep anxieties about Eurpoean influence, the Vorticists took heavy inspiration from the Italian Futurists.
The Italian movement had already begun to have an impact in British culture by 1914 through commentators and contributors such as Marinetti, who toured the capital giving speeches, readings and seminars. In 1913, whilst BLAST 1 was being devised, Lewis and Pound were known to have listened to a reading of Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, by Marinetti himself, at the Florence Restaurant in London. Like BLAST, Zang Tumb Tumb contained a re-inventive anarchy and bravado, that Marinetti called for in his Futurist Manifesto (1909); it defied audio convention, but perhaps more notably, it claimed to be ‘brutally destroying the syntax of speech’, therefore affecting the way it was visually presented on a page. As Alan Bartram translates:
‘The Futurist […] he wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations just as they come to him.’
Bartram claims that for the Futurists ‘only a clean sweep of all customary practices would do’, with the new advances in typographic equipment allowing experimentation in the printed form. After the war, Lewis was particularly insulting about the audio effects of this typographic and syntactical experimentation, writing of a performance by Marinetti;
My equanimity when first subjected to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to my Marinettian preparation- it seemed ‘all quiet’ to me by comparison.
Although this opinion was voiced after the war, its sentiment was one held prior to it, and was partially responsible for putting into motion Lewis’s formation of ‘Vorticism’; in particular, his determination to direct a truly British art, being created out of a constant hostility for the European movements. This hostility provoked Marinetti, who in 1914 published a manifesto named ‘Vital English Art’ alongside an English futurist C.R.W Nevison. This article contained a slanderous attack on the ‘New English Art Club’, the ‘seat of the ‘Great London Vortex’, an important creative hub for the Vorticist artists. In it, Marinetti and Nevison termed them ‘sham revolutionaries, who having destroyed the prestige of the Royal Academy, now [showed] themselves grossly hostile to the later movements of the advance guard.’ As Christopher Adams writes, ‘Nevison and Marinetti effectively presented the Rebel Art Centre as nothing more than an English outpost of the Italian Futurism, thereby denying it an independent identity and undermining Lewis’s leadership aspirations.’ Lewis described these disputes as artists forming ‘militant groups’ and the literary attacks they produced on each other, as well as physical alterations that occurred, as ‘putsches’. Again, like with the ‘Wildean’ past of the avant-garde magazine, this aggression and war-related metaphorical discourse was integral to the strength of BLAST 1’s individual masculine tone. This conflict bled into the relationship of inspiration BLAST’s visual nature had with the physical visual Futurist ‘concrete’ poetry, particularly Zang Tumb Tumb. Zang Tumb Tumb featured some extremely visually challenging literature, exemplifying the visual aspects of ‘concrete’ poetry; (fig. 1) is one such example. The passage describes a Turkish balloon, above the siege of Adrianopoli in the Balkan War, a battle Marinetti himself had witnessed. Words are literally suspended on the page, with the physical appearance of the balloon carved out with its own noun (Pallone). Through onomatopoeic visual signals (‘vibbbrrrrrrarrrre’) the balloon is shown to be amongst the ethereal messages sent by the wireless (TSF- Telegraphie sans fils), their ephemeral nature being shown by the black lines that fall away from them. These black lines exist in a difficult field between illustration and punctuation; they denote movement through the act of solidification and elongation. This reflects the Italian Futurist painters who would go on to represent such dynamic movement in a similar way for the next three decades. A preparatory sketch of Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (fig. 2), painted in 1913, depicts movement using the typical ‘force lines’ coming from the back of the bike. The aversion to this Futurist theory that came as the result of Lewis and Marinetti’s disagreements, paradoxically informed the Vorticist literary and artistic design. BLAST 1 is exemplary of this sentiment. Having seen and experienced the ‘concrete’ poetry of Marinetti and other contemporary Futurist works such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s L'Antitradition Futuriste, Manifeste Synthèse, the magazine’s editors were likely to have wanted to reproduce a similarly visually arresting typography, but without adhering to exactly same theoretical framework, and risking the accusation of complete Futurist influence. BLAST 1’s cover is an example of the result of this fear, featuring an onomatopoeic word without any obvious point of meaning or origin; it is suspended on the page in a such a way to defy typographic and syntactical convention. Although not strictly a poem like Zang Tumb Tumb, the cover and title still attacks the shared target of Futurism and Vorticism; Bartram argues the Futurists attacked ‘the prevailing and (in their view) decadent Classism and hedonistic Symbolism [opening] up the rectangular page to the dynamic organisation and asymmetry which is the basis of modernist design.’ By this logic the Vorticist did just the same, ‘blasting’ the classic with a non-linear design, and opening the page in a way that is reflected in the internal content of the Although Blast 1 does not have a consistently avant-garde attitude towards typography, it is exercised in select pieces. The initial ‘Manifesto’, (fig. 3) for example, appears similar in structure to L'Antitradition Futuriste, Manifeste Synthèse, but applies specific nuances borrowed from Marinetti along with effects specific to the English language. The first line of the first page gives a sense of the visual devices this section of the magazine uses to establish a unique authorial voice. ‘BLAST First (for politeness) England’- This sentence/line uses standard punctuation in conjunction with with font size and case to establish the ‘for politeness’ as a humorous aside, with the rest of the line not contingent to its meaning; the line becomes almost theatrical in the changing tone of authorial voice this allows. The second line, all in capitals, re-establishes an intention of seriousness: this is achieved through the strengthening of tone, via the re-implementation of all capital letters. These examples suggest that, although preaching a break from tradition, the first edition of BLAST relied upon pre-existing notions of grammar and punctuation much more than the Futurist poets. The third line of the same section of Blast does however use a visual paradigm more similar to Marinetti’s later experiments; a visual paradigm, created through a variation in size, font and case. By ‘trapping’ SET between punctuation (a comma) and a change in case it is emphatically ‘set’, with the form representing the immovability of the meaning. It seems to be a more visually (as opposed to syntactically) based way of creating poetic effect. Another line that takes Marinetti’s way of representing physical presence within text is the line ‘(A 1000 MILE LONG, 2 KILOMETER DEEP)’; this line takes up the entire breadth of the page, creating a physical divide, like the water creates in reality. By using lower case for the word deep, but still keeping the first letter capitalized, a further dimension of visual and physical space is added. Whilst still given the same importance as the word ‘LONG’ due to the capitalized first letter, the lowercase reflects a difference in meaning, which in turn reflects a difference in visual and physical space occupied and indicated by the word. The final indication of a Futurist relationship on the ‘Manifesto’s’ first page is the use of the line that bisects the bottom third of the page. Following the use of the line in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb to introduce dynamism, the line in this first section of BLAST 1 is used to establish the text next to it as a list. This would not be obvious, due to the previously lax adherence to conventional grammatical and syntactical rule; the line therefore becomes a heavily visual, quasi-punctuation with a kind of dynamism of its own, shown through it’s versatile use, as seen on the following page (fig. 4). Due to the strained Futurist relationship, BLAST 1 produces these more subtly subversive moments, that would have been more generally palatable to common audiences than the Futurist poetry; and arguably have a more enduring influence on the general use and presentation of text in a visual space. [.....]'
January 15, 2013
I've never been a big fan of the modernist movement or the vorticists, however, this short lived quarterly's debut issue is composed of beautiful typography and features a pre-Hitler-sympathizing Ezra Pound.
December 2, 2011
BLESS PASSION, BLAST OPINION!
March 1, 2022
The idea of reading a 1914 modernist literary magazine (not futurist or impressionist, as they will remind you!) is 5/5. BLAST is the result of a bunch of pre-WWI, hip, young London artists coming together to explain the world as they see it and share their work. However, because the quality of the work varies, I'm giving this a 4/5 overall. I did truly enjoy reading it though.
Highlights: The prefatory "BLESS" and "BLAST" lists are amazing: pompous, clever, often funny. Wyndham Lewis' "Vortices and Notes" are similarly fun to read. Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony" is my favorite proper literary piece from the bunch. It's a short story about a married couple that started a bit off-putting but twisted and turned into the standout from this publication. I wish I could find more of her writing
Least favorite: Lewis' play "Enemy of the Stars." I enjoyed some individual lines, but if the point of a written "play" is to elucidate to the reader what would be happening on a stage, this is barely a play. I only knew what was going on about 2/3 of the time (if I was reading carefully). I liked it, but it was a task to finish
I would recommend BLAST to anyone with a strong interest in the history of art movments, because while it itself is a great representation of "Vorticism," there's also a lot of commentary in here about competing movements and their predecessors, reputations, etc.
Closing with my favorite line from the whole magazine "Mercenaries were always the best troops"
See you soon BLAST #2!
Highlights: The prefatory "BLESS" and "BLAST" lists are amazing: pompous, clever, often funny. Wyndham Lewis' "Vortices and Notes" are similarly fun to read. Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony" is my favorite proper literary piece from the bunch. It's a short story about a married couple that started a bit off-putting but twisted and turned into the standout from this publication. I wish I could find more of her writing
Least favorite: Lewis' play "Enemy of the Stars." I enjoyed some individual lines, but if the point of a written "play" is to elucidate to the reader what would be happening on a stage, this is barely a play. I only knew what was going on about 2/3 of the time (if I was reading carefully). I liked it, but it was a task to finish
I would recommend BLAST to anyone with a strong interest in the history of art movments, because while it itself is a great representation of "Vorticism," there's also a lot of commentary in here about competing movements and their predecessors, reputations, etc.
Closing with my favorite line from the whole magazine "Mercenaries were always the best troops"
See you soon BLAST #2!
June 14, 2024
I bet these guys were a riot at parties.
May 3, 2024
"I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone."
March 17, 2022
Want to call this a "ball of energy" but I think Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound might kill me for using the wrong shape. A cone of energy, then. Sums up better than any other text I've read the intense, hostile genius of the Modernist movement, but also perhaps more importantly just how juvenile and pretentious it was (and demonstrates how that doesn't always come at the detriment of the art). Highlights include Lewis' insane "Enemy of the Stars" play (it's not a play though is it mate) and Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony", one of the best and most cutting short stories I've read in a long time. Pound's contributions honestly numbered among my least favourite, but his savage poems that open the zine are hilarious and a great tone setter, while the trio of Vorticist manifestoes at its close are absolutely ridiculous but also more passionate and dynamic than even their Futurist counterparts in Italy. A staggering volume, at turns jaw-dropping, baffling, and completely laughable; but never less than vital.
P.S. wouldn't want to neglect mentioning how Pound and Lewis' nascent fascism is more than apparent here. It doesn't manifest in the explicit politics of the journal by any means (a slightly mocking nod to the Suffragettes also pays them surprising amounts of respect as the "only other sign of life in London") but their language is already the language of the elitist, and Lewis' writing in particular is well on its way to the aggressive, hyper-authoritarian faux-Nietzscheisms Fredric Jameson writes about. It doesn't detract from the work though; in fact it's intimately tied up with the essence of the magazine's electric power, and I would argue lies right at the heart of the greater modernist movement. An uncomfortable(though fascinating) fact that bears confronting.
P.S. wouldn't want to neglect mentioning how Pound and Lewis' nascent fascism is more than apparent here. It doesn't manifest in the explicit politics of the journal by any means (a slightly mocking nod to the Suffragettes also pays them surprising amounts of respect as the "only other sign of life in London") but their language is already the language of the elitist, and Lewis' writing in particular is well on its way to the aggressive, hyper-authoritarian faux-Nietzscheisms Fredric Jameson writes about. It doesn't detract from the work though; in fact it's intimately tied up with the essence of the magazine's electric power, and I would argue lies right at the heart of the greater modernist movement. An uncomfortable(though fascinating) fact that bears confronting.
April 13, 2023
The first volume of Wyndham Lewis' "Blast" is an interesting and insightful magazine that loudly outlines the Vorticist movement. The main draw is the Vorticist Manifesto, where Lewis, through his abrasive, satirical, and cynical language, tells us that art needs to be dynamic, it needs action, emotion, tragedy, comedy, life, and more.
The magazine is written in such a way that you need to get it, to really "get" it. The magazine, and the manifesto especially, is written to be obnoxious and loud, constantly breaking layout conventions and treating it more like a pantomime of sorts, with the contents really attempting to put an emphasis on the thrill of life and action, whether that be through good or bad consequences and actions.
Lewis believed in eccentricity, and that people should be true to themselves and allow their eccentricity to show, even if that means becoming a person that people hate, and he wanted to throw away the shackles of traditional British stereotypes, and embrace the TRUE British eccentricity, and truly that's one of the main points I took away from this.
BLAST the flabby sloth of this consuming and monotonous age!
BLESS the Vortex!
The magazine is written in such a way that you need to get it, to really "get" it. The magazine, and the manifesto especially, is written to be obnoxious and loud, constantly breaking layout conventions and treating it more like a pantomime of sorts, with the contents really attempting to put an emphasis on the thrill of life and action, whether that be through good or bad consequences and actions.
Lewis believed in eccentricity, and that people should be true to themselves and allow their eccentricity to show, even if that means becoming a person that people hate, and he wanted to throw away the shackles of traditional British stereotypes, and embrace the TRUE British eccentricity, and truly that's one of the main points I took away from this.
BLAST the flabby sloth of this consuming and monotonous age!
BLESS the Vortex!
January 21, 2026
jesus they really hate women
July 16, 2017
An introduction to the short lived art movement of Vorticism, which is quite similar to Futurism, but is really defensive about the fact that it is definitely Not Futurism according to Lewis. They're not about the past OR the future, as those dirty Futurists are. So what are the Vorticists about? After reading their manifesto I still couldn't really tell you, contradiction maybe? Though maybe they'd bless and blast that as well
This volume is a compilation of drawings, plays, poetry and stories, which I am really rather glad about. I think that with something so '''''avant garde''''' and experimental it can be very hit or miss, or bless or blast I suppose for example: Enemy of the Stars, Blast (there is a difference between being minimalist and philosophical and being obtuse and opaque Lewis) and The Saddest Story, Bless, so having a number of different mediums and authors gives it a lot more room to either get it right or wrong
So I mean if you like being confused while being provided with a vague hint that there is something deeper going on check it out I guess
Although I really really would not recc spending prolonged periods of time with this volume, dipping in and out is the way to not get infuriated imo
The best part about this volume tho is thanks to both it and google I found out imberb means beardless, which is cool and goes on the list of words that will never come up irl
This volume is a compilation of drawings, plays, poetry and stories, which I am really rather glad about. I think that with something so '''''avant garde''''' and experimental it can be very hit or miss, or bless or blast I suppose for example: Enemy of the Stars, Blast (there is a difference between being minimalist and philosophical and being obtuse and opaque Lewis) and The Saddest Story, Bless, so having a number of different mediums and authors gives it a lot more room to either get it right or wrong
So I mean if you like being confused while being provided with a vague hint that there is something deeper going on check it out I guess
Although I really really would not recc spending prolonged periods of time with this volume, dipping in and out is the way to not get infuriated imo
The best part about this volume tho is thanks to both it and google I found out imberb means beardless, which is cool and goes on the list of words that will never come up irl
Want to read
August 23, 2014ready april
BLAST
edited by
WYNDHAM LEWIS
To be published quarterly...First Number will contain
MANIFESTO.
Story by Wyndham Lewis.
Poems by Ezra Pound.
Reproductions of Drawings, Paintings, and Sculpture
Etchells, Nevinson, Lewis, Hamilton, Brzeska,
Wadsworth, Epstein, Roberts, etc., etc.
Twenty Illustrations
_______________________
Price 2s. 6d......Annual Subscription 10s. 6d.
American 65 cents...........''.............. $2.50.
Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all
Vital Forms of Modern Art.
THE CUBE....................THE PYRAMID.
Putrifaction of Guffaws Slain by Appearance of
BLAST.
NO Pornography...........NO Old Pulp.
END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA.
BLAST
edited by
WYNDHAM LEWIS
To be published quarterly...First Number will contain
MANIFESTO.
Story by Wyndham Lewis.
Poems by Ezra Pound.
Reproductions of Drawings, Paintings, and Sculpture
Etchells, Nevinson, Lewis, Hamilton, Brzeska,
Wadsworth, Epstein, Roberts, etc., etc.
Twenty Illustrations
_______________________
Price 2s. 6d......Annual Subscription 10s. 6d.
American 65 cents...........''.............. $2.50.
Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all
Vital Forms of Modern Art.
THE CUBE....................THE PYRAMID.
Putrifaction of Guffaws Slain by Appearance of
BLAST.
NO Pornography...........NO Old Pulp.
END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA.
August 31, 2020
Text #1 for my British Modernist Lit class this fall. I found a lot of the manifesto writing in here provocative and interesting, particularly the opening salvo, along with the art-theory later in the text. Class discussion illuminated "Enemy of the Stars," Lewis' play, which I found somewhat inscrutable on first read.
May 10, 2018
This has pretty much scraped a 3 star rating from me, rounding up from 2.5. It's obviously a publication designed to be in-your-face and confronting, although that's a hard character to live up to when it's taken out of its contemporary context. From the perspective of me, reading today... I can admire the conviction and still think the execution is ridiculously over-the-top. (It really is hard to take seriously something that starts with a manifesto. I'm sorry, but it is. "We set Humour at Humour's throat. Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes." Can you really blame me?)
Now in fairness, that over-the-topness is actually entertaining in most of the art and articles herein, in an I-can't-believe-I'm-reading-this-weird-shit way. In others, however, it goes so far into some sort of floral, faux-academic theorising (about vortices, no less) that my bullshit button is well and truly banged on. Basically, it's a quirky, deadly earnest little explosion of thought on Art (the capitalisation is deliberate) that manages to make sense as much as half the time. I imagine it might improve if you read it while high.
Now in fairness, that over-the-topness is actually entertaining in most of the art and articles herein, in an I-can't-believe-I'm-reading-this-weird-shit way. In others, however, it goes so far into some sort of floral, faux-academic theorising (about vortices, no less) that my bullshit button is well and truly banged on. Basically, it's a quirky, deadly earnest little explosion of thought on Art (the capitalisation is deliberate) that manages to make sense as much as half the time. I imagine it might improve if you read it while high.
January 21, 2022
Wyndham Lewis's artistic and literary movement, Vorticism, found its outlet in Blast, a periodical that included works by Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford (among others).
Read the full text here: http://library.brown.edu/
Read the full text here: http://library.brown.edu/
December 10, 2018
Hilarious. That was what they were going for, right?
January 27, 2019
Läste inte Blast som bok, utan en pdf av den faktiska tidningen från 1914. Otroligt speciell. Kan verkligen rekommendera, särskilt om en är intresserad av modernistiska idéströmningar.
October 8, 2021
Reactionary, brash, unwelcoming, needlessly polarising. Everything about this pamphlet is fantastic. Except perhaps the nationalism and elitism. But as a piece of art, it's fantastic.
April 12, 2023
A model for radical papers in the internet/inter-Vorticist age.
The highlights are Lewis’s ‘The Enemy of the Stars’ and especially the latter sections of Rebecca West’s ‘The Indissoluble Marriage’.
The highlights are Lewis’s ‘The Enemy of the Stars’ and especially the latter sections of Rebecca West’s ‘The Indissoluble Marriage’.
July 29, 2023
The English Character is based on the sea.
September 12, 2024
Had to read this for class and it was… something.
Read
October 28, 2024venust, equipoise, métis, vertiginous, asceticism, perforce, insolence, contralto, sententious, decadence
November 24, 2020
wyndham is let down here by his co-stars (who anyway weren't even vorticists). amusing as well to see his promises of a quarterly publication when there was only one issue over a year later
August 25, 2015
Wyndham Lewis was a wonderful artist, probably my favourite to come out of England. There's very little distinction between his abstract paintings and the layout/dry humour of this publication, a real treat for the eyes. Mark E Smith most definitely grabbed one or two ideas from Lewis and the Vorticists, so Fall fans are guranteed to enjoy this.
October 12, 2013
Read #1: An interesting read produced during the early modernist period. It has a very avant garde style, as it plays with typeface, spacing, and art. Parts read as manifestoes, while others are more straight-forward short stories, poetry, or plays.
Read #2: Much more from second read through...
Read #2: Much more from second read through...
October 31, 2011
Didn't find much to enjoy here other than the segment from "Good Soldier", but the publication's history is more interesting than its literary content.
September 15, 2012
A truly unique and empowering collection of modernist expression.
January 25, 2015
Necessary for the scholar of Vorticism.
March 14, 2016
Esoteric, bizarre, inspired, and insane. A wonderful glimpse into the minds of modernism and Vorticism, specifically from Lewis.
January 2, 2025
first re-read of the new year
July 14, 2008
a magazine from 1914 that is still futuristic
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews