Arctic Masks in a Castle of Ice: Gothic Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis’s Self Condemned

Abstract

‘1. Savageness. 2. Changefulness. 3. Naturalism. 4. Grotesqueness. 5. Rigidity. 6. Redundance…’¹: the attention bestowed by John Ruskin on the moral elements of Gothic architecture provides a lineage of ideas which not only point backwards, to the so-called Dark Ages, but also anticipates the early twentieth-century art projects globally known as Modernisms. The aesthetic relevance of Gothic art within the social issues tackled by Ruskin’s oeuvre and its reception within the artistic programme of the early modernist avant-garde in England, have already been critically mapped.² Aware of the necessity of a moral action, in order to dispel the superficial effusions of Victorian humanitarianism, Ruskin saw in the nature of Gothic a way out of a tradition of sterile repetition, which enforced collective social slavery. While his personal utopia demanded that art should reflect and provide moral values to its age, Ruskin’s perception of a decadent fin de siècle rescued by a savage, rigid, grotesquely redundant art, juxtaposing past and present, history and miracle, image and logos and fantastic combinations of human, animal, plant, would consequently lead towards the modernist appraisal of significant form per se — as Clive Bell maintained in Art (1913), and Roger Fry actively promoted.