Vital English art: futurism and the vortex of London 1910-14: C.R.W. Nevinson's pre-war association with the Italian Futurists profoundly affected his art but led to an irreparable split with the rest of the English avant-garde. Michael Walsh explores Nevinson's art in this formative period, using recently discovered images of lost paintings

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Michael Walsh

The recent exhibition 'Blasting the Future: Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920' at the Estorick collection of Modern Italian Art, London, and also at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, placed Italian Futurism firmly at the heart of the English modernist experiment in the second decade of the twentieth century. (1) The curators were at pains to emphasise the tantalising and by no means peripheral or transient links and interactions between the bombastic European polemic of Futurism and the more widely acclaimed British modernist coteries that have received much scholarly attention. In particular, their interpretation shifted the emphasis away from the traditional reading which has long been satisfied with the idea that the potent images of the Great War by C.R.W. Nevinson (traditionally seen as 'England's only Futurist') were his sole contribution to British modernism. An analysis of Nevinson's pre-war opus in London and a reconsideration of the importance of one of the most original and controversial artists, and movements, of this generation are therefore timely. This article sets out to examine how he became involved with F.T. Marinetti's movement, the importance of his friendship with Gino Severini and the use he made of these factors to promote himself to the position of vanguard of the British avant-garde, in the years 1913 and 1914.

'Gay incendiaries'

The extravagant rhetoric of the original Futurist manifesto in 1909 set the tone of a movement in which the method, like the message, was to be uncompromising:

   So let them come, the gay
   incendiaries with charred fingers!
   Here they are! Come on! Set fire to
   the library shelves! Turn aside the
   canals to flood the museums! Oh
   the joy of seeing the glorious old
   canvases bobbing adrift on those
   waters, discoloured and
   shredded! ... Take up your pickaxes,
   your axes and hammers and wreck,
   wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly. (2)

The Futurists' philosophical basis lay in revolt and in the total rejection of the past. Marinetti, described as 'The Caffeine of Europe', was setting out to rid European art of its lethargy and retrospection in a new movement that demanded room for youth, violence and daring. (3) In embracing the modernity of the contemporary metropolis (not least London), the modernist artist was encouraged to substitute the mimetic for the iconic in a metaphorical pragmatism that depended on innovation, instinct and impulse, rather than on an emphasis on recording the mere appearance of the scene or event. It was, in essence, the artistic interpretation of the thing felt, as opposed to the thing seen. London, it was obvious, was a challenging and promising destination for Futurism: on the one hand, it boasted the evolved modernity of industrial and imperial development, and on the other, was cocooned by the strictures of its Victorian inheritance.

As early as 1910, C.R.W. Nevinson's mother, Margaret, a social activist and Liberal suffragette campaigner, reported on an evening Marinetti had given at the Lyceum Club, at 138 Piccadilly, when he had delivered a lecture in French entitled 'Un Discours Futuriste aux Anglais'. (4) Here he had attacked:

   your deplorable Ruskin, whom I
   intend to make utterly ridiculous in
   your eyes ... With his sick dream of a
   primitive pastoral life, with his
   hatred of the machine, of steam and
   electricity, this maniac for antique
   simplicity resembles a man who, in
   full maturity, wants to sleep in his
   cot again and drink at the breasts of
   a nurse now grown old. (5)

Margaret Nevinson wrote in The Vote:

   The members of the society are
   young men in revolt at the worship
   of the past. They are determined to
   destroy it, and erect upon its ashes
   the Temple of the future. War seems
   to be the chief tenet in the gospel of
   Futurism: war upon the classical in
   art, literature, music. (6)

There is nothing to suggest that her son, studying at the Slade, was aware of, or influenced by, Futurism at this time. His father, Henry Nevinson, had also previously come to know and admire some aspects of Marinetti's work, as a result of:

   a never-to-be-forgotten occasion in
   the Balkan Wars, when the Italian
   had found himself cooped up in a
   train full of journalists for a whole
   day, a golden opportunity for him.
   He made the most of it by reciting
   for hours on end various Italian
   poems and expounding the theory
   of Italian Futurism to an audience
   which could not get away. (7)

C.R.W. Nevinson had to wait until the end of 1912 for his introduction to the movement. This came at the 'Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters', which introduced their theories, and over forty paintings, to an unprepared, and soon ideally outraged, public. To the critic Frank Rutter, their works were 'the pictorial rendering of confused nightmares', (8) while C. Lewis Hind felt confident that 'England as a whole will laugh at or loathe these works'. (9) The Times could categorically state that 'The anarchical extravagance of the Futurists must deprive the movement of the sympathy of all reasonable men'. (10)