This list of signatories does not reflect the level of unity and coordination often signaled by the manifesto genre. The manifesto, written by Blast’s editor, Wyndham Lewis, was signed by a group of young writers and artists: Richard Aldington, Malcolm Arbuthnot, Lawrence Atkinson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth, and Wyndham Lewis. It then “blessed” many of those same targets, yet with qualifications that delineated fairly consistent polemical positions. Oversized black capital letters cut diagonally across the cover with the British expletive “BLAST.” The magazine featured a sharply worded, dramatic, often bitingly humorous manifesto that began, “BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND,” and it went on to “blast” the entire Victorian age, much of the British art world, British humor, France, and a wide range of other targets. Its cover was described by the Chicago modernist magazine Little Review as “something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache,” while the Pall Mall Gazette jibed that its color was “chill flannelette pink,” like “the catalogue of some cheap Eastend draper, and its contents are of the shoddy sort that constitutes the Eastend draper’s stock” (qtd. On Ja miserable day of thunderstorms and the hottest day of the year - a new little magazine burst upon London.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |