This vigour was partly due to the commonplace urge to épater le bourgeois but largely it sprang from a specifically artistic desire to find a new means of expression that was appropriate to the spirit of the age. That the Vorticists' work would ultimately have viewers was secondary to sending out a message to their peers. 

However, it must be said that there is a certain sameness to that work — perhaps inevitably given that it was the product of only a three-year period. How Vorticism would have developed without the intervention of the war is unknowable. The group produced two issues of their manifesto/magazine Blast which carried their mission statement, essays, images and poetry (including T.S. Eliot's first works to appear in British print). It "blasted" the effeteness of existing culture and "blessed" the heralds and dynamism of the new. But it was the new, in the shape of world war, that did for Vorticism. As Wyndham Lewis wrote ruefully in 1919, he and his friends had been drowned out by "a multitude of other Blasts".

At the Royal Academy there is a very different nation's view of the modern world: Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century celebrates the genetic strand responsible for a remarkable efflorescence of talent — Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész and László Moholy-Nagy. This seems initially a rather limited and recherché idea for an exhibition; but these men left their homeland in the 1920s and 1930s and went on to transform completely the nature of photojournalism and documentary photography. 

Most of the images are better known than the photographers — the exception being Capa's defining image of the Spanish Civil War, Death of a Loyalist Militiaman. But it is remarkable how many of the other photographs have crept into the collective unconscious to the point that, to an unexpected degree, we see the last century through Mitteleuropean eyes.