An inbetweeners world post-Nursery has left me – Mr Rush Hour writing today – looking after Eve and Leah for a week before Mrs Rush Hour takes over for a more crucial period of settling the girls into the Brave New World that will be Primary School.
To counter Huxley’s troubling vision of a technological future and to mentally steel ourselves for the coming month, we decided to have a parental treat and to see the Vorticists embrace of all things modern and man-made at a Tate Britain exhibition.
This short-lived group of British artists who lambasted the past and looked forward with optimism until the Great War shook and in cases shattered their vision, included a favourite artist for both Mrs Rush Hour and myself, David Bomberg, represented with his famous Mud Bath painting. Eve and Leah were well behaved as we looked at this and sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brezska and Jacob Epstein, paintings by Wyndham Lewis and C.R.W Nevinson and dazzle ship camoflauge works by Edward Wadsworth, and became more well acquainted with three underrated female artists: Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear and Helen Saunders.
A strangely quiet final room afforded Eve and Leah release from Mummy and Daddy taking them around another exhibition, and in a rather appropriate dance style for artists with the idea of the vortex at the heart of their name, the girls took to doing the twist rather energetically in the middle of the dance hall size room. We smiled to ourselves and imagined the Vorticists would have approved this outburst of energy.
Indeed. Great to see them shaking up the art world.