ARTFILE

'The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World', the new show at Tate Britain has all the hallmarks of a blockbuster, but without the need for any hype to prove its credentials. In fact after you have had your ticket torn the initial impact of Jacob Epstein's reconstructed sculpture Rock Drill (1973) is overwhelmingly powerful. It takes up the whole of the first room, its brute magnitude picked out against an entire wall painted synthetic pink, referencing the cover graphics of Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist manifesto BLAST #1 (1914).