Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel opens at the Courtauld Gallery on 14 October. Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World, is a painting known to have been made by da Vinci and copied by many others. The gallery will show Praxitella, loaned from Leeds Art Gallery, alongside the X-ray and partial colour reconstruction of Atlantic City as part of its exhibition of 18 of Saunders’ drawings and watercolours, tracing her artistic development.

The Courtauld hopes the find will spark renewed interest in the artist’s work. The discovery of Saunders’ lost painting was “thrilling”, he said, and the result of the students’ “research brilliance”. “It was only later that the radical nature of the work became valued and celebrated,” said Wright. There was not much of a contemporary market for the vorticists’ work, which may have contributed to the demise of the movement. One speculative theory is that Lewis painted over Saunders’ work in a fit of pique. “She became close friends with Wyndham Lewis, they were extremely close emotionally, but after the war he turned his back on her and she found that hard to take. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. There were only a handful of people in Europe producing that type of hard-edged abstract painting and drawing,” said Barnaby Wright, the deputy head of the Courtauld Gallery and a 20th-century specialist. “In the prewar years, she was one of the most radical painters and draughtspeople around. Saunders was one of only two women to join the vorticists. It gives hope that there are other hidden vorticist paintings waiting to be found.” It has taken 100 years to rediscover Atlantic City. As seen on BBC4s Britains Lost Masterpieces, a team of art experts has. “We realised that when we turned the image of Atlantic City upside down, it had striking similarities with the composition seen in our X-ray of Praxitella,” Chipkin and Kohn said. Unique lost masterpiece discovered at Tatton Park. They found an abstract composition beneath the portrait that was eventually identified as the hitherto lost Atlantic City. The two students, Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn, used X-ray and other imaging technology to investigate the painting. Praxitella by Wyndham Lewis, who was the founder of the radical and short-lived Vorticist movement.īecause of Praxitella’s uneven texture and glimpses of bright red through cracks in the surface paint, scholars had suspected that the 1921 portrait had been painted over another work.

Lost masterpiece found