Vorticism Coin Designs

A brief set by the Royal Mint Advisory Committee to commemorate the cultural impact of the first world war. Vorticism was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century partly inspired by Cubism. The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST which outlined its manifesto and the movement’s rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction. CRW Nevinson, an artist friend of Lewis, had thought up the title late in 1913, a time which predates the term Vorticism. The movement magnified the virtues of the machine. Its visual art was sharp-edged and angular; its literature is frequently described as turbulent and noisy - a product of the industrialisation of pre First World War Britain. Ultimately, it was their witnessing of unfolding human disaster in World War I that “drained these artists of their Vorticist zeal” with some artists in the movement pursuing work as war artists.