VORTEX I. Gaudier Brzeska

Sculptural energy is the mountain.

Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation.

Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.

THE PALEOLITHIC VORTEX resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns.

Early stone-age man disputed the earth with animals.

His livelihood depended on the hazards of the hunt—his greatest victory the domestication of a few species.

Out of the minds primordial preoccupied with animals Fonts-de-Gaume gained its procession of horses carved in the rock. The driving power was life in the absolute—the plastic expression the fruitful sphere.

The sphere is thrown through space, it is the soul and object of the vortex—

The intensity of existence had revealed to man a truth of form—his manhood was strained to the highest potential—his energy brutal—HIS OPULENT MATURITY WAS CONVEX.

The acute fight subsided at the birth of the three primary civilizations. It always retained more intensity East.

THE HAMITE VORTEX of Egypt, the land of plenty—

Man succeeded in his far reaching speculations—Honour to the divinity!

Religion pushed him to the use of the VERTICAL which inspires awe. His gods were self made, he built them at his image, and RETAINED SO MUCH OF THE SPHERE AS COULD ROUND THE SHARPNESS OF THE PARALLELOGRAM.

He preferred the pyramid to the mastaba.

The fair Greek felt this influence across the middle sea.

The fair Greek saw himself only. He petrified his own semblance.

SCULPTURE WAS DERIVATIVE of his feeling for form secondary. The absence of direct energy lasted for a thousand years.

The Indian felt the hamite influence through Greek spectacles. Their extreme temperament inclined towards asceticism, admiration of non-desire as a vice against abuse produced a kind of sculpture without new form perception—and which is the result of the peculiar

VORTEX OF BLACKNESS AND SILENCE.

PLASTIC SOUL IS INTENSITY OF LIFE BURSTING THE PLANE.

The Germanic barbarians were verily whirled by the mysterious need of acquiring new arable lands. They moved restlessly, alike strong oxen stamping.

The SEMITIC VORTEX was the lust of war. The men of Elam, of Assur, of Bebel and the Kheta, the men Armenia and those of Canaan had to stay each other crully for the possession of fertile valleys. Their gods sent them the vertical direction, the earth, the SPHERE, the HORIZON.

They elevated the sphere in a splendid squarity and created the HORIZONTAL.

From Sargon to Amir-nasir—pal men built man-headed bulls in horizontal flight-walk. Men flayed their captives alive and eracted howling hounds over the ELONGATED HORIZON SPHERE BUTTRESSED ON FOUR COLUMNS, and their kingdoms disappeared.

Christ flourished and perished in Yudah.

Christianity gained Africa, and from the seaports of the Mediterranean it won the Roman Empire.

The stampeding Franks came into violent contact with it as well as with the Grocoe-Roman tradition.

They were swamped by the remote reflections of the two vortices of the West.

Gothic sculpture was but a faint echo of the HAMITO-SEMITIC energies through Roman traditions, and it lasted half a thousand years, and it willfully divagated again into the Greek tradition from the land of Amen-Ra.

VORTEX OF A VORTEX!!

VORTEX IS THE POINT ONE AND INDIVISIBLE!

VORTEX IS ENERGY! and it gave forth SOLID EXCREMENTS in the quattro e cinquo cento, LIQUID until the seventeenth century, GASES whistle still now this is the history of form value in the West until the FALL OF IMPRESSIONISM.

The black-haired men who wandered through the pass of Khotan into the valley of the YELLOW RIVER lived peacefully tilling their lands, and they grew prosperous.

Their paleolithic feeling was intensified as gods they had themselves in the persons of their human ancestors—and the spirits of the horse and of the land and the grain.

THE SPHERE SWAYED.

THE VORTEX WAS ABSOLUTE.

The Shang and Chow dynasties produced the convex bronze vases. The features of Tao-t'le were inscribed inside of the square with the rounded corners—the sententile spherical frog presided over the inverted truncated cone that is the bronze war drum.

THE VORTEX WAS INTENSE MATURITY. Maturity is fecundity—they grew numerous and it lasted for six thousand years.

The force collapsed and they accumulated wealth, forsook their work, and after losing their form understanding through the Han and T'ang dynasties, they founded the Ming and found artistic rain and sterility.

THE SPHERE LOST SIGNIFICANCE AND THEY ADMIRED THEMSELVES.

During their great period off-shoots from their race had landed on another continent.—After many wanderings some tribes settled on the highlands of Yukatan and *xiloko.

When the Ming were losing their conception these nei-Mongols had a flourishing state. Through the strain of warfare they submitted the Chinese sphere to horizontal treatment much as the Semites had done. Their crude nature and temperament supplied them wit ha stimulant: THE VORTEX OF DESTRUCTION.

Besides these highly developed peoples there lived on the world other races inhabiting Africa and the Ocean islands.

When we first knew them they were very near the paleolithic stage. Though they were not so much dependent upon animals their expenditure of energy was wide, for they began to till the land and practice crafts rationally, and they fell in con- temporary before their sex: the site of their great energy: THEIR CONVEX MATURITY.

They pulled the sphere lengthways and made the cylinder, this is the VORTEX OF FECUNLITY, and it has left us the masterpieces that are knowns as love charms.

The soil was hard, material difficult to win from nature, storms frequent, as also fevers and other epidemics. They got frightened: This is the VORTEX OF FEAR, its mass is the POINTED CONE, its masterpieces the fetishes.

And WE the moderns: Epstein, Brancust, Aribipenko, Dunikowski, Modigliani, and myself through the incessant struggle in the complex city have likewise to spend much energy.

The knowledge of our civilisation embraces the world, we have mastered the elements.

We have been influenced by what we liked most, each according to his own individuality, we have crystallized the sphere into the cube, we have made a com- bination of all the possible shaped masses—concentrating them to express our abstract thoughts of conscious superiority.

Will and consciousness is our VORTEX.

VORTEX 2 Pound

The vortex is the point of maximum energy,

It represents in mechanics the greatest efficiency.

We use the words "greatest efficiency" in the precise sense, as they would be
used in a text book of mechanics.

You may think of man as that toward which perception moves.

You may think of him as the toy of circumstance, as the plastic substance
RECEIVING impressions, OR you may think of him as directing a certain fluid
force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and
reflecting.

The vorticist relies on this alone; on the primary pigment of his art,
nothing else.

Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in
some primary form.

It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred
pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet spent
itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing.

All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that
is living and worthy to live. All momentum which is the past bearing upon us, race,
race-memory, instinct charging the placid, non-energized future.

The design of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that
is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the
vortex, NOW.

Hedonism is the vacant place of a vortex, without force, deprived of past and of
future, the vortex of a still spool or cone.

Futurism is the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, dispersal.

"Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some
primary form. It belongs to the art of this form." If sound, to music; if formed
words, literature; the image poetry; form, to design; as colour in position, to
painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement to the dance or
to the rhythm of music or of verses.

Elaboration, expression of second intensities, of dispersedness belong to the
secondary sort of artist. Dispersed arts had a vortex.

Impressionism, Futurism which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism,
deny the vortex. They are the corpses of vortices. Popular beliefs, movements,
etc., are the corpses of vortices. Maringhi is a corpse.

The vorticist relies not upon similarity, analogy, not upon likeness, mimicry.

In painting he does not rely upon the likeness to a beloved grandmother or to
a carelessable mistress.

It is art before it has spread itself into a state of flacidity, or elaboration, of
secondary applications.

"All arts approach the conditions of music."

"An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time."

"You are interested in a certain painting because it is an arrangement of lines
and colours."

Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the
movement.

The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concert or emotion
to drag itself out into mimicry.

In painting Kandinski, Picasso.

In poetry this by, "H. D."

Whirl up sea —, whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our
rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fire.