Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939
Torf Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts
January 30—June 1, 2008

In the collection of prints going on display tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts, humans are chiefly represented in clumps: anonymous crowds, armies, bocce players, orchestras, audiences, stick-figure Ballets Russes, eight men with oars forming a human motor, blurred passengers whirling around an ominous proto-Seussian merry-go-round—Oh, the places you (plural) will go. The exhibit highlights artists associated with the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and with a short-lived (but so fetchingly named!) British movement called Vorticism. Coined by Ezra Pound, the term implies a perspective from the still point at the middle of the turbulence—the storm, in this case, being Futurism, with which Vorticism shares some themes and some practitioners, sobered somewhat by World War I. The machines remain, but without their makers' original optimism, and the road forward leads to bleak horizons (trench warfare, and New York).

Some of the most lively, colorful prints depict public transportation: distorted subway cars like mouthfuls of jagged passengers. Bostonist spotted one endless dystopian escalator, crammed with robotic commuters, that we've definitely ridden at Downtown Crossing. (We could almost hear Philip Glass chanting koyaanisqatsi koyaanisqatsi koyaanisqatsi over our shoulder.) The only solitary human figure, Claude Flight's The Conjuror, stands at the center of an endless figure-eight flutter of playing cards and other props that could be a bird, a rabbit, a fish, or other some other easily symbolic animal, and manages to be as unfathomable as the robotic crowds.

(Curiously, these people got advertising work, as demonstrated by the huge posters in the corridor outside the gallery. Only showing in the Boston version of the show, they urge early twentieth century Londoners to visit the zoo or ride the tube, topping hypnotic imagery with chunkily authoritarian lettering.)

Many prints are displayed in multiple versions, with alternate or experimental proofs, a few preparatory sketches, linoleum blocks with some tools, and even one related sculpture. Some of the most compelling images of the bunch are black and white compositions, particularly the nearly typographical neatness of Edward Wadsworth's high-contrast Dazzle ships.
Others use three or four linoleum blocks, building their complexity from layers of inks, hand-rubbed textures, and colored backings that show through the translucent Japanese papers. For those whose might find their curiosity about the printmaking process whetted, the MFA's public programs include a free demonstration of printmaking techniques by Museum School instructor John Schulz on the 10th.

Top: Torf Gallery, with super-reflective baseboards of the future, and wall-sized enlargement of detail from Rush Hour, 1930, by Sybil Andrews (English, 1898–1992).

Left: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (French, active in Britain, 1891-1915), detail from Wrestlers, about 1914.