Vital English art: futurism and the vortex of London 1910-14: C.R.W. Nevinson's pre-war association with the Italian Futurists profoundly affected his art but led to an irreparable split with the rest of the English avant-garde. Michael Walsh explores Nevinson's art in this formative period, using recently discovered images of lost paintings

The recent exhibition 'Blasting the Future: Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920' at the Estorick collection of Modern Italian Art, London, and also at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, placed Italian Futurism firmly at the heart of the English modernist experiment in the second decade of the twentieth century. (1) The curators were at pains to emphasise the tantalising and by no means peripheral or transient links and interactions between the bombastic European polemic of Futurism and the more widely acclaimed British modernist coteries that have received much scholarly attention. In particular, their interpretation shifted the emphasis away from the traditional reading which has long been satisfied with the idea that the potent images of the Great War by C.R.W. Nevinson (traditionally seen as 'England's only Futurist') were his sole contribution to British modernism. An analysis of Nevinson's pre-war opus in London and a reconsideration of the importance of one of the most original and controversial artists, and movements, of this generation are therefore timely. This article sets out to examine how he became involved with F.T. Marinetti's movement, the importance of his friendship with Gino Severini and the use he made of these factors to promote himself to the position of vanguard of the British avant-garde, in the years 1913 and 1914.

'Gay incendiaries'

The extravagant rhetoric of the original Futurist manifesto in 1909 set the tone of a movement in which the method, like the message, was to be uncompromising:

   So let them come, the gay
   incendiaries with charred fingers!
   Here they are! Come on! Set fire to
   the library shelves! Turn aside the
   canals to flood the museums! Oh
   the joy of seeing the glorious old
   canvases bobbing adrift on those
   waters, discoloured and
   shredded! ... Take up your pickaxes,
   your axes and hammers and wreck,
   wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly. (2)

The Futurists' philosophical basis lay in revolt and in the total rejection of the past. Marinetti, described as 'The Caffeine of Europe', was setting out to rid European art of its lethargy and retrospection in a new movement that demanded room for youth, violence and daring. (3) In embracing the modernity of the contemporary metropolis (not least London), the modernist artist was encouraged to substitute the mimetic for the iconic in a metaphorical pragmatism that depended on innovation, instinct and impulse, rather than on an emphasis on recording the mere appearance of the scene or event. It was, in essence, the artistic interpretation of the thing felt, as opposed to the thing seen. London, it was obvious, was a challenging and promising destination for Futurism: on the one hand, it boasted the evolved modernity of industrial and imperial development, and on the other, was cocooned by the strictures of its Victorian inheritance.

As early as 1910, C.R.W. Nevinson's mother, Margaret, a social activist and Liberal suffragette campaigner, reported on an evening Marinetti had given at the Lyceum Club, at 138 Piccadilly, when he had delivered a lecture in French entitled 'Un Discours Futuriste aux Anglais'. (4) Here he had attacked:

   your deplorable Ruskin, whom I
   intend to make utterly ridiculous in
   your eyes ... With his sick dream of a
   primitive pastoral life, with his
   hatred of the machine, of steam and
   electricity, this maniac for antique
   simplicity resembles a man who, in
   full maturity, wants to sleep in his
   cot again and drink at the breasts of
   a nurse now grown old. (5)

Margaret Nevinson wrote in The Vote:

   The members of the society are
   young men in revolt at the worship
   of the past. They are determined to
   destroy it, and erect upon its ashes
   the Temple of the future. War seems
   to be the chief tenet in the gospel of
   Futurism: war upon the classical in
   art, literature, music. (6)

There is nothing to suggest that her son, studying at the Slade, was aware of, or influenced by, Futurism at this time. His father, Henry Nevinson, had also previously come to know and admire some aspects of Marinetti's work, as a result of:

   a never-to-be-forgotten occasion in
   the Balkan Wars, when the Italian
   had found himself cooped up in a
   train full of journalists for a whole
   day, a golden opportunity for him.
   He made the most of it by reciting
   for hours on end various Italian
   poems and expounding the theory
   of Italian Futurism to an audience
   which could not get away. (7)

C.R.W. Nevinson had to wait until the end of 1912 for his introduction to the movement. This came at the 'Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters', which introduced their theories, and over forty paintings, to an unprepared, and soon ideally outraged, public. To the critic Frank Rutter, their works were 'the pictorial rendering of confused nightmares', (8) while C. Lewis Hind felt confident that 'England as a whole will laugh at or loathe these works'. (9) The Times could categorically state that 'The anarchical extravagance of the Futurists must deprive the movement of the sympathy of all reasonable men'. (10)

1913: Nevinson, Severini and Marinetti in London

Following graduation, and a short period living in Paris, Nevinson became acquainted with the Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini in the spring of 1913. Henry Nevinson's private journal, now in the Bodleian Library, recorded 'Severini came to dinner [at the Nevinson household in Hampstead] and talked Futurism in French'. (11) Following this, Severini formed the direct, and vital, link between Nevinson and Marinetti, to whom he wrote enthusiastically:

   I have to tell you about a young
   painter whose name is Nevinson. I
   met him during my exhibition, and
   he introduced me to other young
   artists, who, with him, all became
   convinced futurists ... Nevinson will
   thus introduce himself to you on my
   behalf; he writes to me
   enthusiastically about Futurism and
   will put himself at your service for
   any purpose that you might deem
   useful. (12)

It was not long, therefore, before Nevinson and a disparate band of rebel English artists began to think and work in the mode of the radical Italians. Severini's Self portrait, seen in the background of Fig. 1, would act as a template for Nevinson's own depiction of himself in Fig. 2, while the dashing, suited artist replaced the bohemian of Chelsea (see Fig. 7 also). The association became even more obvious at the Dore Gallery, during 'The Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition', where Walter Sickert, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells and Nevinson, representing the ill-defined Cubo-Futurist 'school', proposed a new enlightened future for English art. Indeed, Nevinson's The departure of the Train De Luxe (Fig. 4) was used as the poster for the show and Frank Rutter, an early convert, went so far as to call it 'the first English Futurist picture'. (13) This early-modern interpretation of a modern theme has a clear debt to Severini's Nord-Sud of 1912 (Fig. 3); both artists attempted to capture the sensation of motion in an urban context, and thus introduced a kinetic element to the painting. (14) They both included truncated words and interlocking planes in a search for simultaneity which was enhanced further by the superimposition of multiple viewpoints of the same objects on an incoherent, shattered, picture plane. (15) In short, it was a modern interpretation of a modern subject, and a celebration of the 'here and now' that the conservative Royal Academy seemed to be ignoring.

We know that Nevinson had also been particularly taken by Severini's Pan Pan at the Monico (Fig. 5), which became the foundation for his At the dance hall (Fig. 6) and Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (Fig. 8). These scenes by Severini and Nevinson revel in the noise and movement of modern music, fashion and dance as seen in two of the main capital cities of Europe. Stylised figures, forms and colour convey the dynamism of the experience, as opposed to creating an accurate visual representation of it.

Delighted with his success and in the midst of the inevitable critical controversy, Severini wrote to Marinetti to tell him of the growing native interest, both positive and negative, in Futurism and to urge him to return to London quickly. (16) A letter from Nevinson to Wyndham Lewis showed that Severini was not alone in his desire and stated with relief, 'I have at last run Marinetti to earth. He is in Brussels! & has just wired me from there & fixed an appointment with me at the Savoy tomorrow (Sat) at 6 o'clock.' (17) Nevinson then went on to establish a committee of rebel artists (including Frederick Etchells, William Roberts and Percy Wyndham Lewis), who organised a dinner in Marinetti's honour at the Florence Restaurant on Rupert Street on 18 November 1913.

Although the idea of the committee was popular and well supported, and although Lewis would later declare Marinetti 'the intellectual Cromwell of our time' and acknowledge that 'England has need of these foreign auxiliaries to put her energies to rights and restore order', there was already suspicion emerging. (18) Lewis in particular did not wish to see the Italian dominate the emergent English avant-garde and Nevinson seemed to share his concerns, which were made clear in a letter he wrote to Lewis the day after the dinner: 'I had quite a great deal of difficulty in preventing Marinetti from again expounding and proposing his philanthropic desire to present us to Europe and be our continental guide.' (19) The rivalry that was soon to split the rebel generation in London had found its roots.

1914. 'De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de I'audace' (20)

When Nevinson and Marinetti finally came together at the Dore Gallery for their first joint public performances in April 1914 it was as part of a Futurist show of eighty works by Boccioni, Balla, Carra, Severini, Soffici and Russolo. (21) The evening was planned as a typical conferenza, giving Marinetti and, in turn, Nevinson the opportunity to deliver their theories on the nature of painting, sculpture, poetry and music. Marinetti's poems 'The Siege of Adrianople' and 'Dynamic & Synoptic Declamation', which, typically, were light on syntax but rich in onomatopoeia, were energetically performed. The former was enhanced by Marinetti's striking wood with a hammer and this was echoed by the beating of 'two big drums in a distant room from which the painter Nevinson, my colleague, produced a boom of cannon fire when I told him to do so over the telephone'. Marinetti described the evening further: 'Blackboards had been set up in three parts of the hall, to which in succession I either ran or walked, to sketch rapidly an analogy with chalk. My listeners as they turned to follow me in all my evolutions, participated, their entire bodies inflamed with emotion, in the violent effects of the battle described by my words-in-freedom.' (22) Even Lewis, recalling the evening in his autobiography in 1937, could not help but profess some admiration for their combined efforts: 'A day of attack on the Western Front, with all the 'heavies' hammering ... was nothing to it'. (23)

Later Marinetti dined at the Nevinson household, where Henry recorded, perhaps disappointedly, that he was 'quite tame and sensible'. (24) It was here too that Marinetti saw, and approved of, Nevinson's most daring Futurist composition to date. The stylistic references in Tum-tiddly-umtum-pom-pom (Fig. 7) were designed to capture the sensation of a crowded scene, once again in homage to Severini's Dynamic hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin. (25) In both paintings, truncated figures appeared, surrounded by scattered words and numbers, the sequence in Severini's composition echoed by the confetti in Nevinson's. In both there was a reference to music, in Nevinson's title and in Severini's inclusion of the words 'POLKA' and 'VALSE'. The poet and critic T.E. Hulme declared Tum-tiddly-umtum-pom-pom Nevinson's 'best picture', (26) although fellow Rebel Art Centre member Henri Gaudier-Brzeska damned it as 'union jacks, lace stockings and other tommy rot'. (27) Roger Fry, Nevinson's most cherished enemy, identified the specific connection between Severini and Nevinson and wrote enthusiastically that the two artists were now on a par: very much each other's equal. (28) More recently, Richard Cork remained unsympathetic and unconvinced, claiming 'It hits out at the sensibilities of the aesthetes with all the boorish conviction of a fist, and the force of the blow was all that the artist really cared about.' (29)

The most distinctive and significant alliance between Marinetti and Nevinson was in the joint declaration of 'A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art', in early June 1914. The document began in typically polemic mode:

   I am an Italian Futurist poet, and a
   passionate admirer of England. I
   wish however, to cure English Art of
   that most grave of all maladies-passe-ism.
   I have the right to speak
   plainly and without compromise,
   and together with my friend
   Nevinson, an English Futurist
   painter, to give the signal for battle.

It then went on to attack: worship of tradition, effeminacy, decorativeness, sentimentality, snobs, the New English Art Club, the King, sham revolutionaries, indifference, the 'right of the ignorant to discuss ... Art', passeiest filth and the 'mania for immortality'. Instead it demanded an 'English Art which would be strong, virile and anti-sentimental' and lobbied for the inclusion of optimism, heroism, creativity, excitement, genius, courage, and pioneering spirit, to save English art. It concluded: 'So we call upon the English public to support, defend, and glorify the genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance forces of Vital English Art--ATKINSON, BOMBERG, EPSTEIN, ETCHELLS, HAMILTON, NEVINSON, ROBERTS, WADSWORTH, WYNDHAM LEWIS' and was signed: 'F.T. Marinetti--Italian Futurist Movement (Milan); C.R.W. Nevinson--Art Rebel Centre (London); (30)

Nevinson's voice, perhaps for the first time in the place of Marinetti's, was heard to reject a variety of institutions specific to England, most notably the Royal Academy. But in addition, the analogies contained in the manifesto's rhetoric were those of English art as a sick patient, for whom Nevinson or the Futurists, would provide the antidotes that would bring to it, via revolution, both hygiene and purity. (31)

As always with Futurism, this was no passive attack, representing a mild difference of opinion. Instead, it was an eye-catching, offensive, insulting and personal document, which Nevinson claimed to have rained down on unsuspecting audiences from theatre balconies throughout the capital. John Rothenstein suggested that had it simply been presented by Marinetti it would have been seen as 'a spirited display of fireworks'. (32) But the fact that Nevinson co-signed it, and thus thrust himself to the forefront of the avant-garde, he suggested, was the true reason for the irreparable rift that was now to occur between Nevinson and his rebel peers. The manifesto, which had been designed to unite the avant-garde artists of the day, was to have precisely the opposite effect, as Ingleby observed: 'In one stroke Nevinson had succeeded in alienating himself from his contemporaries: once again he had become the outsider.' (33) This was as a result of using the Rebel Art Centre address on the manifesto, as if it were the London branch of Futurism, but also of naming, as signatories, individual artists, none of whom had given their consent, or been consulted about what the document contained. (34)

The named artists accordingly counter-parried with a letter to News Weekly on 13 June 1914:

Dear Sir,

There are certain artists in England who do not belong to the Royal Academy nor to any of the passeist groups, and who do not on that account agree with the Futurism of Signor Marinetti. An assumption of such agreement either by Signor or by his followers is an impertinence. We, the undersigned, whose ideals were mentioned or implied, or who might, by the opinions of others, be implicated, beg to dissociate ourselves from the 'Futurist' manifesto which appeared in the pages of the Observer of Sunday, June 1.

Signed

Richard Aldington, Lawrence Aldington, David Bomberg, Gaudier-Brzeska, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis. (35)

The further consequences of the manifesto became apparent in the mutiny at the Dore Galleries, where Nevinson, stepping out from behind Marinetti's shadow, delivered a lecture on the disgrace of immortality in art and how the United States viewed England as 'a little old woman with a past' before reading out a list of enemies of progressive art. (36) These enemies included the King, the 'backwoods of Chelsea', the 'barbarians of the West End' and those who painted in the style of Blake, Constable and Turner. But in alienating himself from the conservative elements of the London art world, he was surprised to see that he was not taking the progressives with him. Indeed, the evening had its unexpected detractors of a most unwelcome origin. Lewis and the artists whose names had been used in the manifesto, with Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska in addition, heckled Nevinson, let off fireworks and generally disrupted the evening. Nevinson particularly recalled the heckling by Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, which acted only as a prelude to violence that finally erupted when Marinetti attacked Gaudier-Brzeska, and Nevinson lunged for Ezra Pound. (37) The London avant-garde was now fatally and irreparably split.

Perhaps the work that epitomises the zenith of Nevinson's peace-time Futurist painting is The arrival (Figs. 9 and 11). (38) It has been suggested that a source for the subject was the French Futurist painter Felix Delmarle, who, while sharing a studio with Severini in Paris, painted two depictions of a similar theme, both called The port (Fig. 12). (39) Certainly in subject matter the arrival in port of a transatlantic steamer would have met the criteria set forward by the Futurists, who revelled in such masterpieces of technology (and who had luckily cancelled their tickets on the Titanic two years before).

The technique Nevinson employed here, of fragmenting the picture plain into a simultaneity of time and movement, would also have been deemed sufficiently modern in pursuit of the illusive concept of 'universal dynamism'. Here, the steamer created a compression of time and space and an interaction with its surroundings, but the approach was still essentially representative, being a kaleidoscopic abstraction of a recognisable central theme. The artist had clearly tried to capture the entirety of events surrounding the arrival of the ship into port and had attempted to hurl the spectator to the centre of his composition. From this perspective, the viewer's conventional sense of space and time was distorted, not to say confounded, in a single vision of the event in its entirety. Surprisingly perhaps, the painting was very well received, though The Star jokingly observed that 'It resembles a Channel steamer after a violent collision with the pier.' (40)

To the press Nevinson was now 'the eminent English Futurist', (41) while Lewis was doing everything possible, not only to disassociate himself and his peers from the Futurist title, but also to promote what was now his own individual cause, Vorticism. Indeed, Lewis laid national claim to the origins of Futurism, saying:

   you wops insist too much on the
   machine. You are always on about
   these driving belts, you are always
   exploding about internal
   combustion. We've had machines
   here in England for donkey's years.
   They're no novelty to us. (42)

Instead, Lewis wanted to move away from the romanticising of the modern era and the representation of the elan vital of Bergsonian flux, (43) towards solidity, rigidity and geometric interpretation. He wanted to exercise a classical control over the phenomenon of modernity in a structural, geometric and precise way, which would imply a reverence for, but not a novel fascination with, the modern industrial era.

On 13 June 1914, angered, and possibly a little concerned at his apparent and sudden isolation, Nevinson wrote to Lewis 'I regret having been the cause of so much trouble & expense to the "Rebel" Art Centre on account of my "irresponsibility" regarding the Manifesto that Marinetti & myself drew up.' He went on to say that he had not meant to imply that the named artists were Futurists, or had even endorsed the movement, but that he had named them as 'advanced forces of English Art'. The attack became more personal as the letter progressed, to the point where Nevinson said that the problems were 'entirely and absolutely the Delusions of your highly suspicious NEURASTHENIC mind'. Eventually he got to the bottom of the problem and concluded:

   Also, neither you nor the others
   have in the past objected to your
   names being used by Marinetti,
   but when my name appears also
   then you adopt your narrow
   minded and pompous tone. There
   lies the cause of the trouble. (44)

In a further letter, dated 14 July, written on board the P.& O.S.N. Co. ship S.S. Maria in the Bay of Biscay, Nevinson wrote angrily to Lewis, guaranteeing that there was now little hope of, or attempt at, reconciliation:

   As a Futurist and not a Vorticist I
   have no doubt I shall change and
   evolve what ideas I possess. I know
   this to be a great source of trouble
   to you as I notice a continuous
   complaint in your articles on
   'automobilism' that the Futurists are
   not doing exactly what they were
   doing two years ago. (45)

Previously Nevinson had been associated closely with the movement and had even promoted it by choice, but now he was having to defend it, and so the Yorkshire Observer observed that Marinetti and Nevinson had now absolutely alienated themselves and remained 'the only orthodox Futurists left in England'. It went on to predict that 'When Signor Marinetti leaves us, Mr Nevinson will have the distinction of Abdiel--"Faithful among the faithless, only he."' (46) However, the historian P. Hamilton takes a different view, boldly saying that Marinetti 'arriving in London in 1912, found the most industrially and scientifically advanced nation in the world, the country of H.G. Wells, overrun with some of its most backward and house-trained poets and painters. Two years later they were breaking up his lectures on a British Futurist programme they claimed more futuristic than the Futurists.' (47)

Futurism, by summer 1914, according to some press reports, was losing momentum. The English Review reported that 'the hideous Futurist craze for sensationalism is happily passing' (48) while another pondered 'I should have thought it was now a thing of the past, exploded by its own silly gun powder train of progressive theory.' (49) War arrived the same summer, however, and Nevinson appeared to be ready for it. Unlike Severini, who remained in Paris, and the other Italians who were frustrated at their country's neutrality, Nevinson immediately became involved, proclaiming 'This war will have a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe that there is no beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness'. (50)

It was clear that even if London had tired of the Futurist novelty, he had not. Now the dilettante, antiestablishment agitator and debauched icon of the pre-war era was publicly embracing the conflict and taking with him an art that he believed ready for the challenge. By November 1914, Nevinson, unlike most of his artistic peers, was uniformed and at the Front as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Ypres Salient. This was an image he liked. The rebel-turned-soldier was captured wonderfully in Nevinson's only surviving sculpture from the period, The automobilist (Fig. 10), which proclaimed Nevinson as the man of the hour who was an ambulance driver in the great struggle unfolding in Europe, but who in more peaceful days would most certainly have been a racing driver or a pilot.

On his return in early 1915, Nevinson proclaimed publicly:

   I am firmly convinced that all
   artists should enlist and go to the
   front, no matter how little they owe
   England for her contempt of
   modern art, but to strengthen their
   art of physical and moral courage
   and a fearless desire of adventure,
   risk and daring ... (51)

In Nevinson's opinion, the undaunted artist, and his continuation of the modernist experiment, would stand as a national symbol of the intact and progressive condition of contemporary English culture--unthreatened by the Kultur of the central powers. Avant-garde art need not be synonymous with avant-guerre, and modernist art could co-exist very comfortably with the modernity of modern warfare. Quite suddenly, therefore, and rather unexpectedly, he--'England's only Futurist'--found himself directly in the firing line, metaphorically as an artist, then literally, on the Western Front.

In private, however, Nevinson had deep concerns, identified in his father's journal: 'Rich much disturbed about the war + the Futurist support of its horror. Declares he will abandon Futurism + and will call his new movement Mintalitist.' (52) After the war, Nevinson, having renounced Futurism once and for all, still found value in the nature and timing of the experiment and said:

   This war did not take the modern
   artist by surprise. I think it can be
   said that modern artists have been
   at war since 1912. Everything in art
   was in turmoil--everything was
   bursting--the whole talk among
   artists was of war. They were in love
   with the glory of violence. They
   were dynamic, Bolshevistic,
   chaotic. (53)

Writing his autobiography over twenty years later, however, he mused on the consequences of his Futurist association and wrote 'It is a black thought for me to look back and see that I was associated with Italian Futurism, which ended in Fascism.' He saw that it had fallen into the wrong hands, principally those of Mussolini, and bemoaned 'What a fate for an intellectual idea!' He did, however, see the value of his apprenticeship and stated that 'some of us were already preparing our technique to express the horror, the cruelty, and the violence which were to be our destiny.' (54)

This article is dedicated to both of my nieces in North Carolina.

(1) 'Blasting the Future: Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920' was at the Estorick Collection of Modern Art, London, 4 February-18 April 2004. It then travelled to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 7 May-25 July 2004. The catalogue, by Jonathan Black, is published by Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2004, ISBN 0 85667 572, 5, 25 [pounds sterling].

(2) F.T. Marinetti, 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism', Paris, 1909.

(3) A. Bozzola. and C. Tisdall, Futurism, London, 1977, p. 8.

(4) The lecture was delivered in French as Marinetti could not speak English.

(5) Cited in R. Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London, 1960, pp. 123-24.

(6) The Vote, 31 December 1910, This was the journal of the Woman's Freedom League, a suffrage organisation of which Margaret was a part.

(7) C.R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, Metheun, 1937, p. 57.

(8) F. Rutter, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 March 1912.

(9) C.L. Hind, Daily Chronicle, 4 March 1912.

(10) The Times, 19 March 1912.

(11) Henry Nevinson Journals. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, e.617/4. 21 April 1913 (hereafter H.W.N. Journals).

(12) A. Hanson, Severini Futurista: 1912-1917, London, 1995, p. 158.

(13) Cited in R. Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, London, 1976, p. 243. It is possible that this painting might also have been known as Gate St Lazare as Rutter claims that the latter was the first English Futurist painting in F. Rutter, Art in my Life, London, 1933, p. 150.

(14) J. Canaday, Mainstreams in Modern Art, New York, 1959, pp. 428-42.

(15) T.M. Scheid, Experimentations in Temporal and Spiritual Techniques, unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio University, 1985.

(16) A.C. Hanson, Severini Futurista, London, 1995, p. 158-59.

(17) Nevinson to Lewis. 14 November 1913. Wyndham Lewis Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Karl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University (hereafter: Cornell). Nevinson hoped to bring Wadsworth to the meeting too, implying the latter's enthusiasm for the movement, as well as his own, but whether or not Wadsworth came is unknown.

(18) P.W. Lewis, 'Man of the Week: Marinetti', The New Weekly, 30 May 1914, p. 329.

(19) Nevinson to Lewis. 19 November 1913. Cornell.

(20) H.W. Nevinson, Visions and Memories, Oxford, 1944, p. 89.

(21) Marinetti to Severini, 16 May. Museo di Arti Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy. This letter highlights a busy schedule in London, including four conferenze and the Coliseum show in June with the intonarumori.

(22) R.W. Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings, London, 1972, p. 147. Apollinaire points out that the concept of words in freedom did not originate with Marinetti and predates him to a poet called Jules Romain at least five years before.

(23) P.W., Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography 1914-1926, London, p. 33-35.

(24) H.W.N. Journals, e.618/2.3 May 1914.

(25) '"Tum-tiddly-um-tum-pom-pom": A Futurist Masterpiece', The Western Mail, 15 May 1914.

(26) T.E. Hulme, 'Modern Art III: The London Group', The New Age, 26 March 1914.

(27) H. Gaudier-Brzeska, 'Allied Artists Associations Ltd', The Egoist, 15 June 1914.

(28) See M. Walsh, C.R.W Nevinson: This Cult of Violence, New Haven, 2002, p. 83.

(29) R. Cork, op. cit., p. 220.

(30) The Vital English Art Manifesto was published in The Observer, 15 June 1914. A comprehensive study of this manifesto has been undertaken by Johann Pillai and Anber Onar and will appear in the forthcoming anthology, M. Walsh (ed.), C.R.W. Nevinson: The Lives of a Modern Bohemian (under review).

(31) L. Somigli, Towards a Theory of the Avant-garde Manifesto, unpublished PhD thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1996. Somigli elaborated on the question of the medical analogy throughout the section concerning all Futurist manifestoes and in particular the English manifesto of 1914.

(32) J. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, vol. II, London, 1956, p. 131.

(33) R. Ingleby, 'Utterly Tired of Chaos', in idem, C.R.W. Nevinson: The Twentieth Century, London, 1999, p. 16.

(34) The others were Roberts, Aldington, Bomberg, Etchells, Pound, Wadsworth, Hamilton and Lewis.

(35) 'Futurism', To the editor, New Weekly, June 1914.

(36) 'The Futurists Again', Manchester Courier, 13 June 1914.

(37) This account of events was related in an unpublished lecture by J. Black at the Estorick Collection, London, in March, 1999, entitled 'The 'Caffeine of Europe Hits England: F.T. Marinetti (1876-1944) & The Futurists in England c. 1910-1914.'

(38) Also exhibited as My arrival in Dunkirk at the London Group, March 1915.

(39) For reproduction of Delmarle's oils see P. Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms, New York, 1986.

(40) 'Shocking Pictures Designed to Jolt the Senses: Cubist reproductions in regent Street', The Star, undated.

(41) G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 11 July 1914.

(42) Lewis, op. cit. in n. 23 above, p. 35.

(43) The idea of elan vital, as developed by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), essentially demanded the primacy of creative impulse and spontenaity over calculated and reasoned analysis.

(44) I have quoted the letter using Nevinson's use of capitals and underlining.

(45) Nevinson to Lewis, 13 July 1914. Cornell.

(46) Yorkshire Observer, 15 June 1914.

(47) P. Hamilton, The Role of Futurism, Dada and Surrealism in the Construction of British Modernism, 1910-1940, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1987.

(48) The English Review, 23 July 1914.

(49) G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 11 July 1914.

(50) Daily Express, 25 February 1915.

(51) C.R.W. Nevinson, 'War Notes and Queries. Comments and Suggestions in Brief from our readers', Daily Graphic, 11 March 1915.

(52) This name appears once only in the history of the period and then in the private journals of Henry Nevinson, the artist's father. No explanation has ever been offered concerning the origin of the name or what the artistic movement might have championed. H.W.N. Journals, e.616/3, 25 October 1914.

(53) 'How the War Vindicated "Modern" Methods in Art', Journal and reviewer unknown, 1919. Tate Gallery Archive, London.

(54) Nevinson, op. cit. in n. 7 above, p. 64.

Michael J.K. Walsh is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Northern Cyprus. He is the author of C.R.W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence (Yale University Press, 2002).

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