Regarding the circumstances in which Wyndham Lewis painted his work Praxitella over Helen Saunders’ Atlantic City, Alan Munton tells only part of the story (Letters, 26 August).
Saunders had been Lewis’s colleague and muse for more than six years when he left her for Iris Barry, the subject of Praxitella, triggering an emotional crisis on Saunders’ part.
Saunders’ large abstract, Atlantic City, was probably stored in Lewis’s studio after the vorticist exhibition of 1915. They were estranged circa 1919-22, making it unlikely that Saunders gave it to him to be painted out, as Munton speculates. Moreover, Lewis’s biographer Paul O’Keeffe records that he was uncharacteristically flush when he started Praxitella, having recently received an inheritance from his father. He could have afforded a new canvas.
Whatever the circumstances, artists do not paint over each other’s works unthinkingly. It’s most likely that Lewis obliterated Atlantic City in a calculated repudiation of Saunders’ major contributions to the vorticist project.
Brigid Peppin
Castle Cary, Somerset
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