Gaudier-Brzeska Exhibition 1956

This was a mimeographed typescript found in a book on World War 1 art. Many thanks to J. Wood Palmer.

   Self Portrait 1913

INTRODUCTION TO THE GAUDIER-BRZESKA EXHIBITION AT

4 ST. JAMES'S SQUARE, LONDON IN 1956 BY J.WOOD PALMER.

   Gaudier-Brzeska was born Henri Gaudier at St Jean de Brays, Loiret on October 4th 1891. He was killed in action with the French army, after twice being decorated for bravery, at Neuville St Vaast on June 15th 1915. For any man this span of life would be counted brief; for the average artist it must preclude any significant development in this work as well as physically limiting his output. Gaudier-Brzeska was not an average artist; for him the three or four years of his working life as a sculptor were sufficient in which to pass through the phases of promise and arrive at a maturity, producing during this period so astonishing an array of sculptures and drawings that his achievement must be unparalleled in our time.

   Enough has been written already about his early life in France,

A Vorticist row in 1967

Revolution 1915 ('The Crowd')

Found in the letters column of The New Statesman of 21 April 1967 this angry exchange about Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis. The Surrealists were famous for arguing amongst themselves and it is interesting to see the vehemence in this post-Vorticist  argument. Michael Ayrton shows Lewis as a difficult man (others were less kind) and Robert Melville's reply scores a few points - but not a direct hit. It is odd that there was any debate about Nevinson being a Vorticist: he is now seen  with Lewis as their greatest exponent...

Sir, Mr Robert Melville contrives to perpetuate an ugly falsehood when he wrote as it was 'with the connivance of Lewis' that the Tate 'took advantage of the public ignorance of Bomberg's early work and included only a single unrepresentative drawing in the exhibition Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism in 1956 to create the impression that he was one of Lewis's lesser camp followers.' A similar argument was vociferously advanced by and on behalf of William Roberts in 1956. David Sylvester took up Roberts's cudgels in the New Statesman and, in passing, pointed out that Bomberg was not a Vorticist at all, but had simply exhibited with them. Denigrators of Lewis are tenacious but they cannot have it both ways. If Bomberg was not a Vorticist but one of what Mr Roberts called 'the Tail' then he had no special place in the Tate exhibition, which was avowedly concerned with Lewis and Vorticism. 

C.R.W. Nevinson 'Return to the Trenches 1914-1915

In fact, Lewis had by then had come to reject everything about Vorticism  as regards the visual arts, maintaining that it had a literary application only. He believed that only one of his own large oils of that period survived - the 'Revolution' of 1915 (now in the Tate) - and that was of no interest.

Give Puce a Chance

Thoughts on puce suggested by this (presumably) early 1914 pamphlet. Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine BLAST (aka 'the puce monster') appeared in July of that year, the same month as war broke out and the pamphlet, judging by the title, appeared earlier that year. Was there a load of puce dye offloaded in London at that time, was it the colour of the moment? Is this really puce? Ezra Pound called Blast  “the great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus” The big Bloomsbury dictionary describes puce as 'a brilliant purplish red colour.' Did Wyndham Lewis spot someone hawking the pamphlet in the street, it seems quite possible - even the typography is similar (at least the angular printing...)

The pamphlet (of which I have the cover only) is unknowable, no such title shows at WorldCat or Copac and the title page may have born a different title and possibly the name of an author. A colour that used to be seen in the 1990s 'hot pink' was similar to puce but rather cheap looking; the 1940s Elsa Schiaparelli colour 'shocking pink' is nearer to the mark but puce has a glamour all of its own. A fine copy of the first BLAST is a rare and valuable thing. They usually turn up in distressing shape; as for the war pamphlet it is probably too rare to have real value.


Below is a recently added and obviously modern puce punk publication - of which I know nothing, except it appears to be part of the enviable collection of kunstler Richard Prince. Such material was highly collected a few years back but  the punk artefact looks somehow more dated than the irascible Lewis's 100 year old puce monstrosity…

Dressing Vorticist (Violet Hunt)

Extract from The Flurried Years - Violet Hunt's account

of her life between 1908 and 1914.

A languid airless summer, rife with Law and Cubism, 

spent at Selsey with Princess Maleine as sole guest 

and play-secretary. Her husband flitted backwards

and forwards in his car, now recalling her, now 

giving her a new leave of absence. Joseph Leopold*,

playing golf,eating little contraband crabs, writing 

poems, and helping me with my novel, and taking 

a car into Chichester on Sundays to attend Mass 

in his own church, contrived to wile the summer 

away. He wrote Impressionist ; she painted 

Futurist; in dress, we two women went a step 

farther and dressed Vorticist, which was newer than 

Futurism, than Cubism, than Impressionism, old- 

fashioned almost by now, but which Joseph Leopold 

was still practising in his cunning vers libres.  

The very clothes we rejoiced to wear made us feel like 

it ; they coarsened us, I think. Non-representational 

art makes for hardness, enjoins the cynicism that likes 

to look upon the crudenesses, the necessaries of life 

merely — the red of beef, the blue of blouses, the shine 

of steel knives in a butcher's shop. Better, said Wynd- 

ham Lewis, than a dying stag or a virgin in Greek dress 

picking daisies. But this kind of art died in the war, 

being relegated chiefly to the camouflaging of ships. A 

faint echo of it is to be seen in modern jazz. 

My friend was very beautiful, with a queer, large, 

tortured mouth that said the wittiest things, eyes that 

tore your soul out of your body for pity and yet danced. 

She had no physique, as doctors would say ; no health, 

as women would say ; and — as no woman would ever 

admit except me — charm enough to damn a regiment. 

I used to call her the Leaning Tower, or Princess Maleine, 

that heroine of Maeterlinck who, with her maid, was 

prisoned in a tower for ten years and dug herself out 

with her nails. She ought not to have dressed in butcher 

blue with red blood spots on it. She was much more 

like one of those delicate, anaemic, mediaeval ladies whose 

portraits are traced on old tapestries, their small waists 

seeming to be set between the enormous wings of the 

hennin** and the heavy rolls of their trains that spread 

all round their feet. The modern blouse and skirt of 

Maleine, born out of her century, always appeared to 

be falling off her, her crown of heavy hair toppling, her 

deep brown eyes protesting against Fate and the absurd 

limitations of behaviour applied to supermen and under- 

women. She was no real suffragette, though she had 

collected with me and rattled a box at stations. Nothing 

but her eyes protested.

* Ford Madox Ford

**The hennin was a headdress in the shape of a cone or steeple, or truncated cone worn in the late Middle Ages by European women of the nobility.