[Petulant style note: Equally flabbergasting is British journalism’s insufferable convention of not setting off titles with quotes or italics. What two researchers rediscovered was not the coastal city located in New Jersey, but a painting named “Atlantic City” by the artist Helen Saunders.]

Icily repellant, she’s fruit of the Tin Man’s dalliance with a galvanized hussy bucket. “Praxitella” of the ruby lips, faceted contours and catatonic gaze is a morose, Depression-era robot stitched in a tar paper frock with elephantine, copper-banded bloomers. She has the charm of a mud fence. It would take a hydraulic winch to hoist the lump of reductive figuration from her pharaonic chair.

Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of film critic Iris Barry is discovered to have been painted on top of a work called “Atlantic City” by fellow Vorticist Helen Saunders. He may have been irritated with Saunders.

(Harriet Sherwood, “‘Fit of pique’: lost vorticist masterpiece found under portrait by contemporary,” theguardian.com, 8-21-22)

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