vorticist lewis/vorticist pound
by 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
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.
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 prin-
ciple 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 rest-
lessness 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 evidences 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.
It is in this context, then, that one must consider Pound’s poetic theory.
But here we must be careful, for although Pound—who met Lewis in 1910—obviously
shared much in his thinking with Lewis, he simply parroted some ideas without
thoroughly understanding their implications, and, most importantly, there were
vital areas where his theory differed from Lewis’ theory and art.
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 funda-
mental 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 com-
promise, as they regarded it. What
struck them principally about Pound was that
his fire-eating propagandist
utterances were not accompanied by any very ex-
perimental 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
No comments:
Post a Comment