Frederick Etchells was born on 14 September 1886 at Newcastle upon Tyne. He studied at the RCA in the years 1908-11 and in Paris 1911-14, where he became interested in the Fauve and Cubist movements. In Paris, he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani. Roger Fry invited Etchells to submit a design for a large-scale mural scheme for the Borough Polytechnic, London, in 1911 and included his work in the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. Etchells had already collaborated with Duncan Grant on a mural for Virginia Woolf’s house in Brunswick Square. Both Frederick and his sister Jesse were members of Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club. She had them to stay at Asheham House, near Lewes in Sussex in the summer of 1912 and liked Jesse, but disliked Frederick, finding him ‘difficult’. In the autumn of 1913, Etchells joined the Omega Workshops in Bloomsbury, but disillusioned with Roger Fry’s approach to business, he was one of those who walked out with Wyndham Lewis. They shared an interest in Cubism and Futurism. The rebels founded the Rebel Art Centre that October and it lasted no more than four months. In December 1913 Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams describing the London art-literary scene as ‘The Vortex.’ Pound thereafter applied the label to the work of ‘English Cubist’ artists such as Wyndham Lewis. Lewis found the strong structure of Cubist painting appealing, but said it did not seem ‘alive’ compared to Futurist art, which, conversely, lacked structure. Vorticism combined the two movements in a strikingly dramatic critique of modernity and announced its arrival on 20 June 1914 in the form of the magazine BLAST. In it, Pound and Lewis atacked the sentimentality of 19th century art and emphasised the value of violence, energy and the machine. In the visual arts, Vorticism was expressed in abstract compositions of bold lines, sharp angles and planes. To the artistic audience of the time, the first issue of BLAST came as a brutal shock, (Lewis’s plan was to create a ‘battering ram’). Described by Lewis as ‘violent pink’, but by others as the ‘puce monster’, the large format magazine displayed radical typography and design, featuring a ‘Vorticist Manifesto’ and eye-popping lists of items that were recommended to be ‘Blessed’ and ‘Blasted’. The 1914 issue had articles and poems by Lewis, Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Edward Wadsworth and Gaudier-Brzeska, with illustrations by Wadsworth, Lewis, Etchells, William Roberts, Jacob Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Cuthbert Hamilton and Spencer Gore. The war number of BLAST came out in July 1915, featuring a dynamic cover by Lewis and offered more highly-charged propaganda on behalf of Vorticism in painting, sculpture and literature. It had articles by Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Breska, Ford Madox Hueffer, T S Eliot, Jessica Dissmorr, Helen Saunders, Etchells, William Roberts, Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Kramer, Nevinson, Roberts, Cuthbert Atkinson, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear and Wadsworth. Despite their past history, Etchells was represented in Fry’s ‘The New Movement in Art’ exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in 1917. Shortly after the end of the Great War, Etchells abandoned art for architecture. In 1927 he translated Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture known in its English title as Towards a New Architecture. In 1929 he translated Corbusier’s Urbanisme which in its English translation became The City of Tomorrow. He also contributed articles to The Studio magazine. Etchells became a pioneer of International Modernism, designing 223 High Holborn, London (1929-30) and 38 Chapel Street, Westminster (1934). He also designed a number of buildings for the Duke of Westminster’s ever-expanding property empire. Etchells later developed a special interest in church conservation and with George William Outram Addleshaw, wrote The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship in 1948. Etchells had a close association with the poet John Betjeman, who was a tenant in one of his flats in Mayfair, during the period when Betjeman was a journalist with The Architectural Review. Etchells became a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and a founding member of the Georgian Group. He married Hester Margaret Sainsbury, a book illustrator and artist. Etchells died at Folkestone on 16 August 1973 and a number of his paintings may be found in the collection of the Tate.