The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to Vorticism, Britain's contribution to the visual avant-gardes that flourished in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Its distinctive figurative abstraction was a London-based Anglo-American response to Cubism and Futurism. Led by poet Ezra Pound and by artist and writer Wyndham Lewis Vorticism flared up between 1913 and 1918.

This title was first published in 2000. Founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis and christened by Ezra Pound, the Vorticism movement was a sustained act of aggression against the moribund Victorianism seen as stifling to artistic energies. Inspired by the example of F.T.Marinetti and the Futurists, the Vorticists were nevertheless harshly critical of the Futurists' naive enthusiasm for modernity. They created their own style of geometric abstraction to celebrate the new consciousness of humanity in a mechanized urban environment. But their splintered and discordant style also measured the cost of the psychic disruption that modernity caused. This illustrated guide to the movement covers topics including sculpture, painting, literary Vorticism, women in Vorticism and Vorticist aesthetics.

Vorticism addresses the seminal innovations in theatre, literature and poetry as well as Vorticist painting, sculpture, print making, and photography that encompassed the Vorticism art movement.

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work. Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.

The 3 volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1980 include the first biography of Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) by the award winning biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, and 2 volumes edited by personal friends of Wyndham Lewis which give a unique insight into the man, his output and his concern with the conflict between the artist-intellectual and the rest of society. Lewis is arguably one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th Century. Equally talented as a writer and painter, Lewis was innovative and controversial and well-known as the driving force behind Vorticism, the avant-garde movement that flourished in London before the First World War. A versatile painter, Lewis’ literary output was prodigous and he mastered a variety of genres – novels, poetry, philosophy, sociology, travel writing, literary and art critic. A leading revolutionary in British painting and a writer of creative genius, Wyndham Lewis also knew personally Augustus John, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who called Lewis ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’.