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Facts & Figures
Synopsis
Editors
Contributors
Gallery
Manifesto
Bibliography
BLAST, the brainchild of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, was a highly experimental little magazine created to first explain the burgeoning Vorticist movement and then showcase its important figures. The Vorticists aimed to discredit both the “hullo-bulloo” of Futurist “Marinetteism” and the adherence to “beauty…in the object or content” of Imagism. While, Vorticism eventually was consumed under the heading of “English Cubism,” its remains interesting for its brash disregard for both the “snobbery” of the elitist avant-garde and the “AUTOMOBILISM” of art designed for popular consumption. As Lewis put it, BLAST was a “battering ram” for the movement, a bold deconstruct the divisions in English society between the poor who “are detestable animals,” and the rich who “are bores without a single exception.”
It consisted of two issues, the June 1914 issue and the July 1915 “War Issue.” The first issue is dominated by the Vorticist Manifesto and the lists of BLASTS and BLESSINGS which follow. The lists, along with the Manifesto, address the aesthetics, politics, and popular consciousness of the “great art vortex sprung up in the centre” of England in the early twentieth century. The second issue contained more artwork along with contributions from T.S. Eliot and Pound. While these two issues comprise the entire run of BLAST, their bold experiments in typography, the poetic manifesto, and graphic art have assured that while there may never be a “VORTICIST KING!”, BLAST endures despite a lack of contemporary interest or audience.
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Last Update 12/04