‘FIT OF PIQUE’

Female Artist’s Lost Abstract Masterpiece Found Beneath Wyndham Lewis Portrait

‘Atlantic City,’ painted by vorticist Helen Saunders in 1915, has been lost for more than a century.

A vorticist painting by a female artist long thought lost has been discovered beneath another painting by the avant-garde movement’s founder using x-ray, according to The Guardian. Imaging technology tests performed by a pair of students at the Courtauld Institute of Art revealed the existence of Helen Saunders’ Atlantic City (1915) under Praxitella, a portrait by Wyndham Lewis six years later. “We were flabbergasted,” the students, Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn, said. “It has taken 100 years to rediscover Atlantic City. It gives hope that there are other hidden vorticist paintings waiting to be found.” Saunders, one of only two women aligned with the vorticists, a radical movement with cubist and futurist roots that attempted to express the dynamism of modern life, was eclipsed by many of her male contemporaries. “She became close friends with Wyndham Lewis, they were extremely close emotionally, but after the war he turned his back on her and she found that hard to take,” one expert told The Guardian. “One speculative theory is that Lewis painted over Saunders’ work in a fit of pique. It’s entirely possible.”