Born: 4 April 1885, United Kingdom
Died: 1 January 1963
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In the 1910s, painter Helen Saunders was one of only two women (the other being Jessica Dismorr) involved in the Vorticists, an artistic movement formed in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis. After Saunders and Lewis became estranged in 1919—and Saunders moved increasingly away from the avant-garde toward realism—Lewis subsequently destroyed one of Saunders’s paintings, Atlantic City, by painting over it to create his own Praxitella in 1921. While some may argue that he just needed a canvas and didn’t want to spend his own money, it seems likely that it was more personal. He was a blatant misogynist and womaniser, as well as a raging homophobe and racist who, incidentally, wrote an entire book about how great Hitler was. He was also known to be petty and jealous, and his so-called literary magazine BLAST has the same premise as a middle school mean girl clique’s burn book—it was a space to “blast” things Lewis didn’t like. (It only had two issues, failing as quickly as its successor, The Tyro.) So, it’s no stretch of the imagination to think Lewis would deliberately destroy a woman’s work—especially one who had rejected him and his art form—to create space for his own.