Editing Vorticism (section)

== Legacy ==
The disruption of war and the subsequent mobilisation of the artists contributed to a situation whereby many of the larger Vorticist paintings were lost. An anecdote recorded by Brigid Peppin relates how Helen Saunders's sister used a Vorticist oil to cover her larder floor and '[it was] worn to destruction'<ref>Peppin, 'Women That a Movement Forgot', p. 32.</ref> – an extreme example of how the paintings were not appreciated. When John Quinn died, in 1927, his collection of Vorticist works was auctioned and dissipated to now untraceable purchasers, presumably in America.<ref>Greene, 'Ezra Pound and John Quinn', p. 81.</ref> Writing in 1974, Richard Cork noted that 'thirty-eight of the forty-nine works displayed by the full members of the movement at the 1915 Vorticist Exhibition are now missing.'<ref>Cork, ''Vorticism and Its Allies'', p. 26.</ref>

Despite a resurgence of abstract art in Britain in the middle years of the twentieth century, the contribution of Vorticism was largely forgotten until a spat between [[John Rothenstein]] of the [[Tate Gallery]] and William Roberts blew up in the press. Rothenstein's 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition 'Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism' was actually a Lewis retrospective with very few Vorticist works. And the inclusion of work by Bomberg, Roberts, Wadsworth, Nevinson, Dobson, Kramer under the heading 'Other Vorticists' – together with Lewis's assertion that 'Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period' –  incensed Roberts as it seemed that he and the others were being set up to be mere disciples of Lewis.<ref>A letter of 15 November 1964 from Lilian Bomberg to William Lipke in the Tate Gallery archive explains that David Bomberg 'was very angry indeed and I think rightly so that he was included in the Wyndham Lewis Tate Gallery exhibition'.</ref> The case made by Roberts in the five 'Vorticist Pamphlets' that he published between 1956 and 1958<ref>See John Roberts, [http://www.englishcubist.co.uk/vortexpamphlets.html 'A Brief Discussion of the Vortex Pamphlets'], which first appeared in William Roberts, ''Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings'' (Valencia, 1990).</ref> was hampered by the absence of key works, but led to other self-published books by Roberts which included early studies of his abstract work.<ref>William Roberts,  ''Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work'' (London, 1957) and William Roberts, ''8 Cubist Designs'' (London, 1969).</ref> A broader survey was provided by the d'Offay Couper Gallery's 'Abstract Art in England 1913–1914' exhibition in 1969.<ref>11 November–5 December 1969.</ref>

Five years later, the exhibition 'Vorticism and Its Allies' curated by Richard Cork at the Hayward Gallery, London,<ref>27 March–2 June 1974.</ref> went further in painstakingly bringing together paintings, drawings, sculpture (including a reconstruction of Epstein's [[Rock Drill (Jacob Epstein)|Rock Drill]] 1913–15), Omega Workshop artefacts, photographs, journals, catalogues, letters and cartoons. Cork also included twenty-five 'Vortographs' from 1917 by the photographer [[Alvin Langdon Coburn]] that had been first displayed at the Camera Club in London in 1918.<ref>The exhibition catalogue was subsequently supported by Richard Cork's two-volume history ''Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age'' (London : Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1976).</ref>