Helen Saunders was a significant artist whom Wyndham Lewis promoted in his Blast magazine in 1914 and 1915. But the remarkable discovery that her work Atlantic City is below Lewis’s Praxitella of 1921 does not mean that he painted over it because he was annoyed (‘Fit of pique’: lost vorticist masterpiece found under portrait by contemporary, 21 August).
Saunders’ painting changed in the 1920s, becoming less abstract, and one wants to ask how Lewis got hold of this canvas. Surely Saunders must have given it to him? It’s reasonable to suggest that she no longer wanted it. And Lewis was often short of money to buy canvases.
