Maybe he just needed the canvas, as he often ran out of money. Scholars are unsure why Lewis would have painted over a work by one of his close contemporaries. “We realized that when we transformed the image of Atlantic City upside down, it had striking similarities to the composition seen in our x-rays of Praxitellesaid Chipkin in the statement.Ītlantic City depicts a “fragmented modern metropolis”, according to the Courtauld. An image of one of these works, Atlantic Citycaught the attention of Chipkin and Kohn. “Blast France, Blast England, Blast Humor, Blast the years 1837 to 1900,” proclaims the newspaper in a manifesto written by Lewis and signed by 11 other artistic and literary figures, including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound and Saunders.Ī number of Saunders’ paintings and writings have been featured in Blast during his short run the journal published only two editions. Edited by Lewis, Blast took this name because he “castigated” entities that irritated the Vorticists. The students, Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn, spent six months scanning the canvas with high-resolution scanning equipment, but were unable to identify the hidden artwork until they come across a reproduction of one of Saunders’ paintings in Blast, the journal which shamelessly declared the fundamental principles of Vorticism. Praxitelle portrays film critic Iris Barry, but as the Guardian‘s Harriet Sherwood writes, clues pointed to the possibility that another piece of art was hiding below: PraxitelleThe texture of is uneven and the bright red paint pierces through cracks in its surface. Saunders’ lost painting was revealed in 2019, when two Courtauld students undertook an X-ray study of Praxitellewhich Lewis painted in 1921. And now, more than a century later, researchers have found it, hidden under a work by Wyndham Lewis, the famous founder of Vorticism, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London announced in a press release this week.

One of these paintings was Atlantic Citycreated around 1915. Over time his legacy has been largely forgotten and nearly all of his Vorticist paintings have been lost. Helen Saunders was one of only two women to join this radical movement, now considered England’s first avant-garde group. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.

The group received its name from the poet Ezra Pound, who believed that “the Vortex is the point of maximum energy. Bright colors, strong lines, and hard angles evoke the slash of modern machines in Vorticist works. On the eve of World War I, a London-based group of iconoclastic artists heralded the beginnings of Vorticism, a movement that rejected “sentimental” Victorian aesthetics in favor of bold abstraction celebrating the vitality of industrialism. © the Courtauld / Estate of Helen Saunders Lewis’ X-ray Praxitelle next to a reproduction of Saunders Atlantic City

Possible lost masterpiece found