Praxitella: Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry and Helen Saunders at Leeds Art Gallery
We take a look at the artists overlooked in the histories of post-war British modernism...
September 5, 2023
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
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Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
.jpg)
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
.jpg)
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
.JPG)
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
.jpg)
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident,’ it advises. ‘We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them.’ [Blast, No.1, 1914]
Helen Saunders has been painted out of the history of abstract art in Britain – quite literally. Her contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, is well-known as the founder of Vorticism, a short-lived movement that grappled with anxieties particular to society post-World War l: the dynamism and speed of modern life, and the horror of mechanised war.
Wyndham’s struggle to paint the ‘Praxitella’ (1921) - a task he claimed called for the strength of 24 water-buffalo – embodied the Vorticists’ radical bid to connect the avant-garde and the popular and, perhaps contradictorily, ‘democratic’ Brits with fascist-leaning Futurists in Italy.
Only recently have researchers at The Courtauld uncovered the painting’s foundations – and how Lewis painted the Praxitella over Saunders’ original ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915). To be sure, he could afford the new canvas; Saunders had been Lewis’ friend and colleague for over six years when he rejected her, almost without reason, in 1917. At the time, his contemporaries remarked how he had lost his ‘pre-war jauntiness’, becoming suspicious and uncooperative.
Lewis’ decision was a purposeful, perhaps even spiteful, one. In Saunders, it triggered an emotional crisis – and would send her deeper into the historical vortex. Along with Jessica Dismorr, she was one of only two women (and more, founder members) of the movement. But until now, all of her Vorticist paintings were thought lost, a fate which befalls many women artists.
Brigid Peppin, Saunders’ surviving relative and ‘guardian’ of her estate, highlights how only two of Dismorr’s survived the war that followed. Most of her works were destroyed after her death in 1939, as they supposedly ‘cast doubt’ on her sanity. Saunders remained anonymous for much of her radical career, to spare her middle-class family from shame, opting for ‘poor independence’ over privilege.
Despite its name, Things Left Unsaid has plenty more to say than its previous iteration at The Courtauld. Where Modernist Rebel focussed more on the artist as an individual – and the (fascinating) conservation process - here, her practice is relocated amongst her contemporaries. In London, we learned of her devotion to Paul Cezanne, another artist ‘solitary by nature’, with her soft watercolours, and quiet feminism. In Leeds, she comes out with a little more kicking and screaming, and we see her social and political character, another layer to the artist, and woman.
The first issue of Blast, the Vorticists' literary magazine, outlined the movement’s Manifesto but stopped short of publishing the Suffragette Manifesto too. Its ‘Note’ is less an expression of solidarity, and more a respectful nod to Saunders and Dismorr, both signatories with close friends in the WSPU. These words reveal both artists’ positions within the organisation – and force us to rethink how ‘radical’ it really was.
Leeds Art Gallery’s neighbour, the Henry Moore Institute, lends some remarkable first editions from its archive, showing lists of the ‘Blasted’ and ‘Blessed’, and poetry, the surprising heart of the movement. The very word Vorticism was coined by Ezra Pound, the American ex-pat in London, and Blast was also the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s poems in the UK.
Indeed, neither exhibition could have happened without such collaborations. Interesting parallels can be drawn with the Institute’s current display of Egon Altdorf, a multidisciplinary artist and poet, whose works were born of another post-war environment.
Blast’s distinctive magenta covers are propped open on the pages where we find women’s plural contributions. Despite having no first-hand front-line experience, Saunders’ affecting poems evoke a sense of drowning and inevitable death in the deep mud of the Western Front. Suffocation and claustrophobia certainly permeate her practice. At The Courtauld, works on paper like ‘Hammock’ (1913-1914) hint at the artist’s politics, but also her ability to personally and visually relate between the states of women and the state of war.
The shaded, segmented head of Blanche Caldwell in ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (c.1913) highlights an ‘intuitive understanding’ of cubism. Indeed, Saunders was particularly interested in integrating sculpture within her practice, perhaps an early precursor to sculptural paintings. In another work on paper, she carves out an irregular mount around the egg-shaped head of her protagonist, a nod to her Romanian, Paris-based contemporary, Constantin Brancusi.
Nearby sit works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, the definitive sculptors of the London-centric movement, and both migrants ‘from other countries and cultures’. In acknowledging Vorticism’s global connections, the curators can’t resist putting something more local first. It begins with the Leeds-based Ukrainian Jacob Kramer, whose paintings serve as evidence of antisemitism encountered by radical Jewish artists in the movement.
Saunders’ ‘The Rock Driller’ (1913) comes titled – by who? - after an Epstein sculpture which survives now only in reproduction. It’s another, accidental, contribution to his better-known history, but here it is weaponised to suggest a woman’s different perspective on modernity. Epstein’s sculpture is a symbol of virility, a masculine indulgence in the power of the machine for the machine’s sake; Saunders’ supposedly lacks all such attributes and ego.
Saunders’ clenched-fist composition from 1915 is also curated in conversation with Epstein’s Flenite sculptures, a series self-conscious in its effort to evoke an ancient creation myth. Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, and William Roberts, working in other media, are also related to across the room. Here, we also find Wyndham Lewis’ lurid Tyros - ‘other-worldly grotesques’ – interpreted as wholly new expressions of the post-war period. However, they encourage us again to challenge Vorticism’s own origin, and original, myth.
Lewis was explicit in his bid to expose the ‘mass sensibility’ – or perhaps Victorian sensibilities – of the age. Initially a breakaway of the Bloomsbury Group and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Vorticists proclaimed their base at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. A newspaper photograph shows the leaders of the new set, including C.R.W. Nevinson – another who fetishised Italian Futurism – and Kate Lechmere, their funder. Saunders, and the photographer’s name, are expectedly absent.
For all their novelty, Lewis’ Tyros draw on well-worn conventions. His self-portrait offers only a short-shock value for its sickly green aspect; he wears a similar grimace to the subjects of New Objectivity works in Germany, and the same yellow and red colours favoured by Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom he deeply admired. While Saunders’ works share some cubist, sculptural qualities, his washy portrait of the artist pales in comparison to hers.
Saunders, like Lewis, turned from Vorticism in the 1920s to pursue more figurative works, a major focus of the Courtauld’s exhibition. Both shows provide a great range of works on paper – a particular highlight, as they are so often marginalised as ‘preparatory’ works for something more final, especially in the context of sculpture. It only reinforces how neither art nor history have settled conclusions but are constantly changing – and ripe for reinterpretation.
It is also a pleasure to see limited sources and histories more creatively interpreted. Saunders’ ‘Cabaret’ details her contemporaries’ work in the decoration of Madame Strindberg’s renowned London jazz club, the Cave of the Golden Calf. Saunders is not known to have been directly involved in the project. Still, hand-drawn grid marks hint she had similar, architectural, plans.
Alongside the conservation display, Leeds provides not one but three more shows, the main addition being Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella. The focus here, however, is her avant-garde ‘imagist’ poetry, which attracted the attention of Pound and led to her migration from the US to London. Here she moved in circles with Eliot, Saunders, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a political activist, magazine editor, and patron of the writer James Joyce (like Lechmere, another subtle inclusion by the curators, to acknowledge the financial power of women and collectors).
As Lewis turned on Saunders after the war, he turned towards Barry, with whom he was also in a relationship. Yet, neither exhibition speculates nor perpetuates competition between these women; Things Left Unsaid looks at overlaps in their practices, decentring Lewis altogether. Poetry provided both with a portable means of creative production, who also undertook wartime work for Government Departments. In ‘Double’ (1916), a poem published in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine and scouted by Pound, Barry writes:
‘Through the night, riotously
I ride great horses
But in the pale day I sit, quiet.’
In Leeds and London, the titles still start, and perhaps must, with the familiar Wyndham Lewis. Yet it is Barry and Saunders who get the last word. As women are so often responsible for men’s archives, estates, and legacies, it is wonderful to see women across generations – whether Peppin, or the Courtauld’s conservators Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn – taking such good care of these pasts, putting them back in our presents too.
Things Left Unsaid: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Iris Barry, Helen Saunders and the story of Praxitella is showing at Leeds Art Gallery until 5 November 2023.
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