Our Little Gang: The Lives of the Vorticists by James King.
Vorticism was so aspirational and so intense that at times it got lost in its own intentions… but for its machine age embrace of abstraction, nothing could surpass it. With its title derived from a comment by Ezra Pound once made, “Our Little Gang”, James King’s book covers a movement so misunderstood that he took an in-depth, artist-by-artist approach to clarifying it all.
We learn about Frida Strindberg’s Cave of the Golden Calf in London, for which she commissioned Wyndham Lewis to make an artwork – Kermesse. Seeing the piece, Roger Fry invited Lewis to exhibit in one of his Post-Impressionist shows. How close competing avant-gardists were to each other in London! As King makes clear, Vorticism had aspects of Cubism, but “experimented even more boldly with colour, employed more angular shapes and distorted spatial perception more dramatically.” Even more surprising for a Fascist sympathiser like Lewis was the anti-Futurist stance. He feared being absorbed by the international movement…
James King has given us fresh insights into the lesser-known female members of the Vorticist movement… Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespear. Blast 2 contains some strong feminist content, notably the images and poetry of Saunders and Dismorr.
Vorticism seemed to be in a constant state of flux as King makes clear. The artists closer to, or involved in the movement, like Gaudier-Brzeska and T.E. Hulme, were pell-mell and rather at odds due to the international influences in France. C.R.W. Nevinson, whose On the Way to the Trenches (1915) featured in Blast 2, suggested in an interview in The Studio that he was rejecting Futurism and favouring naturalism, quoting Cezanne. For the irreverent and brilliant typography, formatting, layout and bold presentation, Blast 1 and Blast 2 remain one of Wyndham Lewis’ truly great contributions to the art of Great Britain… reaffirmed by James King’s Our Little Gang.
By John K Grande
Our Little Gang The Lives of the Vorticists by James King, Reaktion Books / Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2025, 230 pp., illustrated throughout, indexed
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John K Grande