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Man Ray, 'Self Portrait' (detail), 1913
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Alvin Langdon Coburn, 'Ezra Pound' (detail), 1913
Lecture:
Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914-1917
Showtimes:
Wednesday Mar 14 04:00 PM
Location:
Doris Duke Theatre
About the Lecture:
When the impact of Vorticism—a British offshoot of Cubism with clear ties to Futurism—on the visual arts in America is considered at all, it has routinely been configured around the activities of the New York collector John Quinn, who sponsored the movement’s last group exhibit at the Penguin Club in January 1917. By then, it is characterized as a clapped out movement, sustained in name only by the energies of Ezra Pound; the Penguin Club show itself caused barely a stir.
If we confine our considerations to Pound’s influence on Quinn’s collecting or the 1917 exhibit, Vorticism is, indeed, a marginal affair. In this lecture, Allan Antliff contests this reading by arguing for an American variation of Vorticism in art, autonomous from but influenced by the British-based movement, which followed its own distinct trajectory in the years leading up to the Penguin exhibition. Tracing the impact of Ezra Pound’s configuration of Vorticist aesthetics in the Blast, New Age and Egoist journals on Man Ray and others in his circle during 1914-1917, Antliff will unpack a new chapter in the history of Man Ray's oeuvre. His discussion culminates with an examination of Man Ray’s critical reworking of Vorticism’s precepts under the influence of Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray’s turn to Dada, Antliff argues, begins here.
Allan Antliff is Canada Research Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art, Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada.
This lecture is free.
