This last section concerns the influence of French avant-garde visual arts on the English arts in the 1910s, particularly in relation to Vorticism. Visual arts on
the Continent had been known to a number of progressive English artists and critics for some time, although the public had largely been ignorant until milestone exhibitions such as the Allied Artists Association (AAA) Exhibitions (from 1908 onwards) and the two notorious Post-impressionist Exhibitions (November 1910 to January 1911, and October to December 1912) brought the art of the European avant-garde to London and created a considerable stir in public opinion.114 However, despite their radicalism in the eyes of the English
public, Post-impressionist paintings were not the contemporary avant-garde by Continental standards. In France, mid-nineteenth century Impressionism was followed by Post-impressionism, a generic name for diverse painters and practices such as Cézanne and the Fauvist School, with a particular focus on the use of colour and the means of representation. Cubism took root in the mid-1900s with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a large-scale painting which ‘ignore[s] the rules of perceptible space, naturalistic coloration, and the rendition of bodies in natural proportions’.115 The repercussions of this
dramatic shift in the mode of artistic representation were widespread in the European avant-garde and even in England, where painters quickly took up similar experiments; for example, the use of multiple and fragmented perspectives, abstraction, geometrical shapes and mask-like faces in representing the body influenced Lewis’s works. The French fascination with African sculpture also initiated a return to primitivism, which can be observed in Hulme’s aesthetic theories, as well as Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein’s sculptures.
114 An account of the English’s (un)familiarity with French visual experiments can be found in J. B. Bullen, ‘English Criticism and French Post-Impressionist Painting’, in Studies in Anglo-French
Cultural Relations: Imagining France, ed. by Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988), pp. 47-67.
Dayan observes that ‘internationalism’ played an important role in the Parisian avant-garde, observing that ‘the interart aesthetic is internationalist as well as intermedial. It refuses absolutely to consider the quality of art as bounded by national borders’.116 It is true that labels like ‘Fauvism’ and ‘Cubism’ had no
explicit national connotations (unlike Expressionism and Futurism), and artists regardless of their nationality were free to experiment in the style of these schools. Significantly, many of the artists associated with Vorticism had lived in Paris prior to the start of the movement: Lewis stayed there from 1902 to 1908 chiefly to study painting, and Hulme and Eliot also resided in the city around 1910 and attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France. Others including Pound, Etchells, Epstein and Bomberg visited Paris and witnessed the vibrant art scene there. Roger Fry also organised the Exposition de Quelques Artistes Indépendants Anglais at Galerie Barbazanges in Paris in May 1912, a small-scale exhibition which showcased the works of Bloomsbury painters and future Vorticists, including Etchells, Lewis and Helen Saunders.117
Another group of painters with substantial French connections is the Rhythmists, a circle of predominantly Scottish and American artists of Fauvist style working in Paris; only Jessica Dismorr (later a Vorticist) was English.118 In
1912 this group held a very prominent show at the Stafford Gallery in London, and participated in the international exhibition ‘Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes’ in Cologne, with Rhythm describing the latter as a representation of ‘English Art’, ironically a misrepresentation of the national identities of the
116 Dayan, Art as Music, p. 4.
117 Mark Antliff and Vivien Green, eds., The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World (London: Tate, 2010), p. 181; Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984), pp. 22-23.
Rhythmists, 119 yet nonetheless a demonstration of a definite reach of
Anglo-American artists in the Continental arena.
In late 1913, the Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition (October 1913) and the Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubist and others (December 1913 to January 1914) provided opportunities for progressive English artists to showcase their works in avant-garde settings, for example the Cubist Room in the latter exhibition, and alongside French works.120 However,
Didier Ottinger suggests that as English avant-garde art had not yet manifested itself as a distinct school like other European avant-garde movements, ironically Lewis ‘had no other choice but to agree to be described as a “Cubist”’.121
Progressive groups at the time include the London Group (which evolved from the more selective Camden Town Group) and the Bloomsbury artists (including the Grafton Group which ran the Omega Workshops); yet these groups were considerably diverse, were in constant flux of amalgamation and antagonism, and the group names are seemingly only a convenient way for them to exhibit together rather than indicating a unanimous aesthetics.122 As awareness of the
European avant-garde increased in England, the English artists sought to distinguish their works from those on the Continent by establishing their own variety of avant-garde art.
119 Ibid., pp. 133, 138.
120 Antliff and Green, The Vorticists, pp. 181-182. Clive Bell compared Lewis’s ‘Kermesse’ favourably to Delaunay’s L'Equipe de Cardiff also on display (Clive Bell, ‘The New Post-Impressionist Show’, The Nation (25 October 1913); Morrow and Lafourcade, A
Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis, p. 269), while John Cournos in his review ‘The Battle of the Cubes’ (New Freewoman, 15 November 1913) held an opposite view.
121 Didier Ottinger, 'Cubism + Futurism = Cubofuturism', in Futurism, ed. by Didier Ottinger (Paris; Milan: Éditions du Centre Pompidou; 5 Continents, 2009), pp. 20-41 (p. 39).
122 Rebecca Beasley, '"A Definite Meaning": The Art Criticism of T.E. Hulme', in T.E. Hulme and
the Question of Modernism, ed. by Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (Aldershot: