Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn rediscovered a masterpiece by English Painter Helen Saunders, a member of the Vorticist movement. This painting will debut this October at London’s Courtauld Gallery.
Vorticism was a literary and artistic movement that flourished between 1912 and 1915 in England. The movement attempted to relate art to industrialization and spotlighted the role of machines in human societies.
The lost work, titled Atlantic City (1915) was detected in 2019 by two of Courtauld’s former students beneath another painting: Praxitella.
Praxitella is a portrait of film critic and curator Iris Barry by Wyndham Lewis, the founder of the Vorticist movement. The surface of Praxitella raised suspicion of it being composed above another painting due to its uneven and odd coloring that was visible through the cracks in the paint’s layers.
Chipkin and Kohn had run an X-ray analysis of Praxitella to find Saunder’s work of a fragmented black and white metropolis evoking a style inspired by Cubism. The duo identified the underpainting to be a reproduced image of Atlantic City in Blast, the Avant-grade journal of the Vorticist movement.
“We realized that when we turned the image of Atlantic City [in Blast] upside down, it had striking similarities with the composition seen in our X-ray of Praxitella,” said Chipkin and Kohn. “We were flabbergasted. It has taken 100 years to rediscover Atlantic City. It gives hope that there are other hidden Vorticist paintings waiting to be found.”
Saunders was one of two women to join the Vorticists, a group of avant-garde painters and writers active in London in the early 20th century. The artists of the movement favored an angular style, bright colors, and urban and industrial subjects.
Poet Ezra Pound coined the term “Vorticists,” which Wyndham Lewis, a cofounder, once described such: “You think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated, and there at the point of concentration is the Vorticist.”
The movement largely disbanded after World War I, and few paintings from its members survived. Praxitella, on loan from the Leeds Art Gallery, will be displayed alongside the X-ray and partial color reconstruction of Atlantic City in “Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel,” opening at the Courtauld Gallery on October 14.
“It is hoped the rediscovery of this major work will spark greater interest in Saunders’ work and the work of other female painters, whose work has historically been overshadowed by their male contemporaries,” the Courtauld added.
