Online Talk. Women in Art: The Case of Vorticism

In this second event in the Barber’s Wyndham Lewis series, we explore Lewis’s contrasting representation of women in art with his apparent erasure of them from art history.

This event challenges Lewi’s claim that Vorticism, the avant-garde art movement he played a central role in founding immediately before the First World War, was what he ‘personally did and said’. We will focus on the women artists who operated in Vorticism’s ambit: Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Kate Lechmere, enabling us a deeper and more rounded understanding of Vorticism and of their positions as cosmopolitan women active in the cultural and political milieu of the 1910s.

Dr Nathan Waddell, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham will be in conversation with Art Historian Jo Cottrell. This talk will include an introduction to the Barber’s print by Wyndham Lewis, Froanna.