BLAST (journal)

Blast

Cover of the first edition of Blast, 1914
Editor	Wyndham Lewis
Categories	Vorticism
First issue	1914
Final issue	1915
Language	English

Blast was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. Two editions were published: the first on 2 July 1914 (dated 20 June 1914, but publication was delayed) and published with a bright pink cover, referred to by Ezra Pound as the "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus"; and the second a year later on 15 July 1915. Both editions were written primarily by Wyndham Lewis. The magazine is emblematic of the modern art movement in England, and recognised as a seminal text of pre-war 20th-century modernism. The magazine originally cost 2/6.

When the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti visited London in 1910, as part of a series of well-publicised lectures aimed at galvanizing support across Europe for the new Italian avant-garde, his presentation at the Lyceum Club, in which he addressed his audience as "victims of .... traditionalism and its medieval trappings," electrified the assembled avant-garde. Within two years, an exhibition of futurist art at the Sackville Gallery, London, brought futurism squarely into the popular imagination, and the press began to use the term to refer to any forward-looking trends in modern art.

Initially galvanized by Marinetti's verve, Wyndham Lewis—like many other members of the London avant-garde—had become increasingly irritated by the Italian's arrogance. The publication of the English Futurist manifesto Vital English Art, in the June 1914 edition of The Observer, co-written by Marinetti and the "last remaining English Futurist" C. R. W. Nevinson, Lewis found his name, among others, had been added as a signatory at the end of the article without permission, in an attempt to assimilate the English avant-garde for Marinetti's own ends. On 12 June, during recitations of this manifesto and a performance by Marinetti of his poem The Battle of Adrianople, with Nevinson accompanying on drums, Lewis, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and five others roundly interrupted the performance with jeering and shouting. Wyndham Lewis wrote a few days later, "England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about".