Edward Wadsworth 1889-1949
Edward Wadsworth was an English artist, famous for association with Vorticism. He painted, often in egg tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life.
Wadsworth was a key figure in many of the most important British art movements of the first half of the 20th century. In 1913 he helped found the London Group as a new forum for showing stylistically challenging art; in 1914 he worked briefly at Roger Fry's Omega workshop, before becoming a leading member of the Vorticists, his woodcuts appearing in the first edition of Blast. In the 1920s he was influential in the (French) Rappel a l'ordre and (German) Neue Sachlichkeit movements, which advocated a return to a more neoclassical, realist style of painting; and in the 1930s he was a founder member of two radical abstract movements, Unit One and the Paris-based Abstraction-Creation. Wadsworth's paintings (and indeed his early Vorticist woodcuts), contributed significantly to the language and ideas of each of the artistic collectives to which he belonged, while each evolution in his own style and subjects was connected to the lag by his consistently sophisticated sense of pictorial design and meticulous technical execution.
Edward Alexander Wadsworth was raised in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire and was educated in Edinburgh. His industrialist father had hoped he would follow his lead and continue to work in the family mill. He was sent to Munich to study engineering (1906-1907), however in his spare time, he focused on studying art at the Knirr School. On his return, he was accepted by Bradford School of Art and later was awarded a scholarship at the Slade School of Art, London (1909-1912). His contemporaries there included Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, CRW Nevinson, Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington.
Wadsworth was strongly associated with other artists such as Percy Wyndham Lewis, one of the main figures linked to the Vorticist movement. Vorticism, like Cubism and Futurism, aimed to embrace dynamism, the machine age and all things modern in art. Through the employment of bold lines and harsh colours, the Vorticist artists strived to catch movement in an image. Wadsworth contributed to the Vorticist Exhibition in June 1915 at the Doré Gallery and acted as signatory of the Vorticist Manifesto published in BLAST magazine.
Edward Wadsworth went on to spend his War years in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He designed dazzle camouflage for allied ships to confuse the enemy, a project recently recounted in the Liverpool Biennial. These vessels were not camouflaged to become invisible, but instead used ideas derived from Vorticism and Cubism to confuse enemy U-boats trying to pinpoint the direction and speed of travel (for more on the project see also the Smithsonian Magazine)
Throughout the 1920s Wadsworth's avant-garde tendencies began to subside, however he still focused on naval and maritime themes which he knew best. The 1930s saw him retract back to abstraction; in 1930 he joined the international Abstraction-Creation group and Paul Nash's Unit One team.
His father died in 1921 leaving Wadsworth an inheritance which enabled him to travel to Italy and explore different mediums to draw and paint in. It is in Italy where he encountered his love for painting in tempera. He was adept in a variety of mediums, however, it was in tempera that Wadsworth produced his renowned series of abstracts, harbours and ports in the 1920s and '30s. For examples, see his paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland, Crank and Chain, and Tate, Dux et Comes I.
He lived and worked in Cleckheaton and Kensington and is buried in Brompton Cemetary.
