How does The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 elucidate its Creation?
The Tour Eiffel restaurant had been visited frequently by the Poets' Club of T. E. Hulme, including F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound, and thus had been a centre for Imagism. It became a favourite location for the literary circles around Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis and Nancy Cunard, which through Lewis included the Vorticists. As Richard Cork has noted, however, Robert's picture is "an imaginative evocation rather than an historically accurate record" of the launching of Blast, which actually took place with a meal at the Dieudonné Restaurant in St James's in July 1914.In a 1957 piece for The Listener, Roberts reminisced about the relationship between Vorticism and the restaurant:In my memory la cuisine Française and Vorticism are indissolubly linked. Both Signor Rossi of the Etoile, and M. Rudolph Stulik of the Tour Eiffel should rank in the records of Vorticism as honorary members of the 'Group'. Lewis who liked good food, and fine wine to go with it, kept a ringed serviette in each of these restaurants. If, as he claimed, Vorticism was the expression of a new philosophy, then it must be the newness of Rabelais, and of old Omar Khayyam's 'A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me singing'. Nor was it developed in the gloom of a studio, but at the Tour Eiffel over a tourne-dos and a bottle of Burgundy.
The first and only exhibition of the Vorticist group was held in June 1915 at the Doré Gallery in London. In addition to the artists present in Roberts' painting, the exhibition featured Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Bernard Adeney, Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, Duncan Grant, Jacob Kramer and C. R. W. Nevinson.
Vorticist F. S. Flint tourne-dos Omar Khayyam Rabelais Duncan Grant Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Jacob Kramer Poets' Club T. E. Hulme Wyndham Lewis Lawrence Atkinson The Listener C. R. W. Nevinson Blast David Bomberg Bernard Adeney Richard Cork Imagism la cuisine Française Burgundy Nancy Cunard Vorticism Augustus John St James's Ezra Pound