The ‘Lost’ Colours of Praxitella – Science and the Symbolic

An informal and relaxed lunchtime talk by the gallery’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nigel Walsh. It will explore how the discovery of a painting by Vorticist Helen Saunders under the surface of Wyndham Lewis’s portrait Praxitella (1921), might unravel new meanings of both artworks.

Does the reconstruction through science of the ‘whited out’ lost colour world of Saunders’s ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915) disrupt understanding of Lewis’s portrait in which he struggled to establish a new language for Western avant-garde art in the post-war world?