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  • IMAGE CREDITS
    banner: detail from 'Mechanischer Kopf' (Der Geist unserer Zeit), 1918 [Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris]
    cover: N° 1 (1914) [The Modernist Journals Project]

blast

  • cover BlastBlast was the quintessential modernist little magazine. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, it ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it, along with some of its key contributors. Its purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened Vorticism by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in visual art. The first issue included artwork by Lewis, Gaudier-Brezka, and others, along with the manifesto for Vorticism, written largely by Lewis, but also signed by Ezra Pound, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr and Henry Gaudier-Brzeska. Although their work was also included, Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg did not sign. Echoing Blake's 'Damn braces! Bless relaxes!', Blessed and Blasted sections list what the Vorticists like or hate (e.g. Paris). It also included a play by Lewis and fiction by Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West. The second issue included a notice of Gaudier's death in France. Despite its short life, it was a powerful influence in the shaping and promoting of modernism.
  • TEXT CREDITS
    Introductory text to Blast as part of the The Modernist Journals Project [URL http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/mjp/show_series.xq?id=1158591480633184].
  • DESCRIPTION
    • Subtitle Review of the Great English Vortex.
    • N° 1 (June 1914) - N° 2 'War Number' (July 1915).
    • Edited by Wyndham Lewis, with editorial contributions from Ezra Pound. Published by John Lane, the Bodley Head, London.
    • The first issue was 168 pages, and the cover was pink with BLAST written in large black letters diagonally across the page. The second issue was 112 pages.
    • An index to Blast is available on the site of the Modernist Magazines Project.
    • Bibliographic references:
      Little Magazines & Modernism
  • FACSIMILES/REPRINTS
  • online
    • Blast, The Modernist Journals Project.
  • printed
    • Blast. Review of the great English vortex (Kraus Reprint : New York 1974).
    • Blast (Black Sparrow Books : Santa Barbara CA 1981, 1993-1997). Reduced size.
    • Blast Nr. 1 and Nr. 2 (Gingko Press : Corte Madera CA s.a.).
  • SECONDARY LITERATURE
  • Mark Morrisson
    'Blast - An Introduction', published as an introduction to Blast on the site of the The Modernist Journals Project (includes references).
  • Paige Reynolds
    '"Chaos Invading Concept". Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture', in Twentieth Century Literature 46, Nr. 2 (Summer 2000) 238-268.
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  • Wyndham Lewis
  • Portrait Wynham Lewis by George Charles Beresford, 1917(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was originally associated with the Bloomsbury group's Omega Workshop but left having fundamental differences of temperament and outlook, and Lewis was later to satirise the Bloomsburys in The Apes of God (1930). Lewis subsequently founded, with Kate Lechmere, the Rebel Art Centre. Although this lasted only four months it gave birth to Vorticism and to the first issue of Lewis's magazine Blast. The signatories to the Vorticist Manifesto in Blast included Ezra Pound, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the painter Edward Wadsworth.
  • Although Vorticism was clearly related to Futurism and other forms of machine-age 'Dynamism', Lewis and Pound were keen to assert their independence, and claimed that while they were at the centre of the Vortex, Futurism was only "the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it".
  • In January 1918 Lewis secured a position as an official war artist. In his first commission, 'A Canadian Gun Pit' (1918), he was obliged to compromise his Vorticist style, but he reasserted it in such works as 'A Battery Shelled' (1919). His drawings and water-colours depicted soldiers as being as machine-like as their artillery pieces. Although this illustrated the de-humanising nature of modern war, it is also another manifestation of Lewis' lifelong preoccupation with the image of men as automata.
  • It was during the War that Lewis wrote a text which is key to understanding his personality and outlook. Lewis' Nietzschean article 'The Code of a Herdsman' was first published in The Little Review in 1917.
  • Vorticism, like Futurism, captured the zeitgeist of the pre-war age and was destroyed by the war in which Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska were both killed. In the period following the first world war Lewis "went underground", immersing himself in study, and would henceforth become better known as a writer of fiction, criticism, and polemical journalism than as an artist.
  • TEXT CREDITS
    Cited from 'The Art And Ideas Of Wyndham Lewis', essay by Rik (Revised 7 January 1999) [URL http://www.fluxeuropa.com/wyndhamlewis-art_and_ideas.htm].
  • IMAGE CREDITS
    Portrait Wynham Lewis by George Charles Beresford, 1917 [Collection National Portrait Gallery, London - URL http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/].