Editing Vorticism (section)

== Prelude to Vorticism ==
[[File:Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein.jpg|thumb|120x160px|right| ''Rock Drill'' in Jacob Epstein's studio ''c''.1913]]
[[File:Wyndham Lewis, 1912, The Dancers.jpg|thumb|160x200px|left| ''The Dancers'' Wyndham Lewis, 1912]]

In the summer of 1913 Roger Fry, with [[Duncan Grant]] and [[Vanessa Bell]], set up the Omega Workshops in [[Fitzrovia]] – in the heart of bohemian London. Fry was an advocate of an increasingly abstract art and design practice, and the studio/gallery/retail outlet allowed him to employ and support artists in sympathy with this approach, such as Wyndham Lewis, [[Frederick Etchells]], [[Cuthbert Hamilton]] and [[Edward Wadsworth]]. Lewis had made an impact at the Allied Artists' Salon the previous year with a huge virtually abstract work, ''Kermesse'' (now lost),<ref>[[Clive Bell]] in ''The Athenaeum'' of 27 July 1912 explained that, in order to appreciate this work, visitors 'having shed all irrelevant prejudices in favour of representation will be able to contemplate it as a piece of pure design'.</ref> and in the same year he had worked with the American sculptor [[Jacob Epstein]] on the decoration of [[Madame Strindberg]]'s notorious cabaret theatre club [[The Cave of the Golden Calf]].

Lewis and his Omega Workshop colleagues Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth exhibited together later in the year at Brighton with Epstein and [[David Bomberg]].<ref>‘''The [[Camden Town Group]]: An Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others’'', Public Art Galleries, Brighton,  December 1913–January 1914.</ref> Lewis curated the exhibition's 'Cubist Room' and provided a written introduction in which he attempted to cohere the various strands of abstraction on display: 'These painters are not {{sic|?|accidently}} associated here, but form a vertiginous, but not exotic, island in the placid and respectable archipelago of English Art.'<ref>Quoted by Cork, ''Vorticism and Its Allies'', p. 12.</ref>