Wyndham Lewis
Workshop
(c.1914–15)
Tate
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson
La Mitrailleuse
(1915)
Tate
Edward Wadsworth
The Port
(c.1915)
Tate
The Centre, based at 38 Great Ormond Street in London, was a short-lived enterprise and by the summer of 1914 had closed down as a result of internal disputes. Yet, in those brief months, it had hosted an exhibition of sculptures by the prodigiously talented Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a lecture by the writer Ezra Pound.
Originally set up as a rival to Roger Fry’s art and design collective Omega Workshops, the Rebel Art Centre pursued a hotly militant form of futurism that was to become known as vorticism. Its members numbered the Omega defectors Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and Edward Wadsworth and the painter Kate Lechmere. The centre featured geometric murals painted by Lewis and screens designed by Christopher Nevinson. Little collective art was produced at the centre, but it became the early headquarters of the vorticists and the radical art publication Blast.