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Review [published April 2010]
Wyndham Lewis: Blast
Ben Granger
First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just
been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries,
when the Great British reading public scanned the
covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to
the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were
in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their
thoughts on encountering this shock pink punch, this
blinding black statement of intent, forcing the eye to
flinch in its wake. Most would find it abhorrent, as people
do with genuinely new ideas. But these ideas tend
to find a way. This cover was an electric flash, heralding
a storm threatening to engulf the formal pastoral of
before. The aftershock of this storm still reverberates.
What was Blast? Ostensibly, the first “journal of
the Vorticist movement”, published in 1914, which
only ever made it to issue two. In effect, the warped
premature brain-child of one Percy Wyndham Lewis,
a spiky spiteful self-styled Enemy of the Art establishment,
and Vorticism (“of the Vortex”) was his vehicle
for unleashing a crusade against them. Each word and
image is heavy with the scent of his venom, slashing
at those who wouldn’t accept his self-proclaimed
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
genius. The one truly original British art movement of
the first half of the 20th century was animated almost
single-handedly by one man’s bile. But what was in
it? Blast includes examples of Vorticist art by Lewis
and his contemporaries, his own art and literary criticism,
his unstage-ably extreme two man play Enemy
Of The Stars, poetry by Ezra Pound, and short stories
by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Brown. Most
notable however was its first section, and most unique
construct, the Blast Manifesto.
This manifesto is printed in the typography of contemporary
posters, those advertising gaudy entertainments
such as the circus or boxing match, and cascades forth
in aphorism heavy bombast: ”We start from opposite
statements of a chosen world / Set up violent structure
of adolescent clearness between two extremes … We
only want Tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like
hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like
a bomb…”
Deliberately overwrought, powered by excess as
if by rocket fuel, ready to declare war on art and the
world, “BLASTing” and “BLESSing” the world as if
319
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