Group X

Group X was a short-lived association of British artists founded by Wyndham Lewis in 1920. It emerged as an attempt to sustain and continue attention to avant-garde art in Britain after the First World War, when the earlier radical movement of Vorticism had effectively collapsed as a result of the war and the death of several of its members. Group X included former Vorticists and artists close to them, among them Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Cuthbert Hamilton, Jessica Dismorr and Frank Dobson. The group held only a single joint exhibition, at the Mansard Gallery in London in March 1920, and had no unified artistic programme or shared manifesto; its members were bound less by a common style than by a desire to assert modernist positions in British art. Owing to this lack of internal cohesion, the association soon dissolved. Despite its brevity, Group X is an important record of Wyndham Lewis's efforts to revive the prewar avant-garde impulse and marks a transitional moment in the history of British modernism between Vorticism and the art of the interwar decades.