A “Modern Rendezvous” in London: Painters, Pilots, and Edward Wadsworth’s A Short Flight (1914)

Abstract

Edward Wadsworth’s A Short Flight was first exhibited in June 1914 and reproduced in the Vorticist journal Blast later that summer. Vorticism’s leader, Wyndham Lewis, had spent the time leading up to the inaugural publication of Blast trying to differentiate the English movement from Italian Futurism, and did so by adopting a more sceptical attitude in the face of Futurism’s technophilia. Accordingly, A Short Flight has been read as a painting that portrays the individual as subservient to the mechanized world. Disputing that interpretation, this article resituates A Short Flight in the context of aviation in London before the First World War, when 120,000 people attended the meeting at Hendon Aerodrome over the Easter weekend of 1914. Moreover, four pilots flying at Hendon were amongst the names that the Vorticists “Blessed” in Blast. Fellow painters and patrons flew from the venue, which quickly assumed the status of a fashionable “modern rendezvous”. Coming in the wake of F. T. Marinetti’s description of his flight over Milan in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, but anticipating the response of Futurism’s own painters to the theme of aviation, Hendon made the ideal subject for a painting that contested Futurism’s claims to be the art of the modern metropolis.

Keywords

• Edward Wadsworth
• Flight
• Aviation
• First World War
• Vorticism
• Futurism
• Blast Magazine