Bradford: View of a Town
Edward Alexander Wadsworth British
Not on view
In a posthumous tribute to Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis, the artist, writer, and a founder of Vorticism, described an interwar visit the two took to Yorkshire. Lewis wrote that, from their vantage point at the top of a hill, Wadsworth pointed to the town of Halifax below: "We gazed down into its blackened labyrinth. I could see he was proud of it. ‘It’s like Hell, isn’t it?’ he said enthusiastically." Bradford, depicted here, is about five miles from Cleckheaton, where Wadsworth grew up and where his family’s mill was located. The sharpness of the image reflects the precision his learned from his studies of machine draftsmanship in Munich. As in other works, Wadsworth adopted an elevated, almost aerial view, which, combined with the reductive angular forms and the rigor of the design, creates a nearly abstract image.
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