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Lot Essay
Study in Blue (1912) was executed at a formative moment within the canon of Modern British art: two years before the first, incendiary issue of BLAST announced Vorticism to the world, and while Wyndham Lewis was still absorbing the Cubist and Futurist currents that would evolve, by 1914, into his own singular idiom. In the present work, a nude figure, arms raised, stands to the right, almost pinned against a churning field of blue, its diagonals suggesting rigging, sail or hull as much as pure abstract structure. Body and environment are barely distinguishable from one another: the figure’s raised arms echo the setting’s strong lineation, while the same hard, angular strokes define muscle and machine part alike.
This tension between human form and mechanical structure was already central to Lewis’s ambitions by 1912. He had shown with Roger Fry at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition that autumn, and was fast developing the conviction—soon to define Vorticism outright—that modern painting should possess, in his own words, ‘the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist’ (‘Room III. (The Cubist Room)’, in Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others, exh. cat., Public Art Galleries, Brighton, 1913, p. 10). Study in Blue catches this conviction in its infancy: less aggressive than the mechanised bodies of his 1913-1914 work, but unmistakably alive with the same drama of the human figure and the dynamic, sharp-edged world closing in around it.
The prevailing blue of the composition is itself significant. Where Dancing Figures, executed just two years later, is charged with a ‘heated orange colour’ that Richard Cork found central to its sense of excitement, here the cooler tonality lends the composition an almost nautical, weather-beaten quality, its rigging-like diagonals hinting at the maritime and industrial imagery Lewis would return to across his work. Few pictures so vividly capture Lewis at this point of origin, before his Vorticist movement had a name, but with all its force already gathering. Study in Blue stands as a powerful early statement of the ideas that would soon crystallise into Vorticism.
This tension between human form and mechanical structure was already central to Lewis’s ambitions by 1912. He had shown with Roger Fry at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition that autumn, and was fast developing the conviction—soon to define Vorticism outright—that modern painting should possess, in his own words, ‘the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist’ (‘Room III. (The Cubist Room)’, in Exhibition of the Work of English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others, exh. cat., Public Art Galleries, Brighton, 1913, p. 10). Study in Blue catches this conviction in its infancy: less aggressive than the mechanised bodies of his 1913-1914 work, but unmistakably alive with the same drama of the human figure and the dynamic, sharp-edged world closing in around it.
The prevailing blue of the composition is itself significant. Where Dancing Figures, executed just two years later, is charged with a ‘heated orange colour’ that Richard Cork found central to its sense of excitement, here the cooler tonality lends the composition an almost nautical, weather-beaten quality, its rigging-like diagonals hinting at the maritime and industrial imagery Lewis would return to across his work. Few pictures so vividly capture Lewis at this point of origin, before his Vorticist movement had a name, but with all its force already gathering. Study in Blue stands as a powerful early statement of the ideas that would soon crystallise into Vorticism.