Percy Wyndham Lewis Composition in Red and Mauve, 1915 – Vorticist Art Print

Composition in Red and Mauve (1915) is one of the small group of paintings produced during the brief working life of Vorticism, the British avant-garde movement Percy Wyndham Lewis co-founded in 1914 and led until the First World War effectively ended it. The composition stages a collision of sharp diagonals, mechanical-feeling planes, and dissonant colour pairings — the visual vocabulary Lewis developed in opposition to what he saw as the soft pastoralism of contemporary English painting.

Vorticism took its name from Ezra Pound's notion of the vortex: a point of concentrated energy through which ideas pass. Its principal vehicle was BLAST, the journal Lewis edited and largely designed, whose typography — enormous black sans-serif headlines on bright pink paper — was as much a part of the movement's identity as any of its paintings. The contributors included Pound, T. S. Eliot, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and Jessica Dismorr. The movement formally lasted from 1914 to 1915, derailed by the war, but its visual influence on later British abstraction was substantial.

Lewis himself was less a specialist than a sustained multi-disciplinary career: novelist (Tarr, The Childermass, The Apes of God), portraitist (his sitters included Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Naomi Mitchison), magazine editor, polemicist, and critic. The paintings of 1914–1915 are the sharpest visual record of a moment when British modernism briefly produced a distinctive native idiom rather than importing one from Paris.

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