Blast: a review of the great English vortex, no 1, London, John Lane, 1914, Rare Books collection

At the outset of WWI in 1914, poet Ezra Pound and painter and writer Wyndham Lewis established Blast magazine, launching the short-lived Vorticist movement. Influenced by Cubism, the Vorticists opposed the sentimentality of Victorian art and championed the machine age. The war proved fatal to Vorticism, both literally (several key members were killed at the front) and philosophically: disillusioned by the war’s mechanised destruction, surviving members returned to representational art.