- 著者
-
要 真理子
- 出版者
- 跡見学園女子大学
- 雑誌
- 跡見学園女子大学文学部紀要 = JOURNAL OF ATOMI UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF LITERATURE (ISSN:13481444)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.58, pp.A139-A152, 2023-03
This article focuses on Vorticism --the only avant-garde art movement in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century-- and, more specifically on its central figure, Wyndham Lewis, dealing with the ideology found in texts and activities of Vorticists. The fact that the latter-mentioned group, which started in 1914 and ended the following year, envisaged an ideal urban plan based on a philosophy of vortex (the origin of this group’s name) is made clear in the avant-garde magazine Blast (1914, 1915), as well as and in the book the Caliph’s Design(1919), written by Lewis after the demise of the group’s activities. Unlike the avant-garde art movements of the 1920s in other Western European countries, there was no expansion from contemporary art to extensive urban planning in Britain. It is therefore worth noting the ambitious, if abortive, attempts at urban renewal that Vorticism left behind in its writings. In those writings, we can see that, for Vorticists, the city is always shaped by some force indicated by “vortex”. This vortical force is typically found in the designs in drawings and magazines created by the hands of Vorticists, but it was also a model for this urban restructuring. In the current article, we do not read these designs visually, but reconsider their design ideology - -which is common across genres such as painting, literature and architecture-- from the perspective of urban planning, specifically from Lewis’s texts.