Facsimile edition edited
by Wyndham Lewis
The second and final issue
of Lewis’s BLAST The War Number appeared in July, 1915, and is a very
worthy successor of the first BLAST published in 1914. It features a dynamic
cover by Lewis and more of his highly charged propaganda on behalf of Vorticism
in painting, sculpture and literature. It also contains prose and poetry
by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and the historic instructive aesthetics
of ”Vortex (written from the Trenches)” by Gaudier-Brzeska a piece
composed just before the sculptor’s death in France.
L o n g L i v
e t h e V o r t e x !
Long live the great art
vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!
We stand for the Reality
of the Present not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past.
We want to leave Nature and
men alone.
The only way Humanity can
help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously.
WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS
OF HUMANITY their stupidity, animalism and dreams.
We believe in no perfectibility
except our own.
Intrinsic beauty is in the
Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content.
WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO
LIVE, and to feel its crude energy flowing through us.
Blast sets out to be a venue
for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no
other way.
Blast will be popular, essentially.
It will not apppeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and
popular instincts in every class and description of people. TO THE INDIVIDUAL.
The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong
to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental
Artist that exists in everybody.
We want to make in England
not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering
of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals, wherever found.
We will convert the King
if possible.
A VORTICIST KING !
WHY NOT ?
Arthur Magazine 