Neue Luxury is a global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

Neue Luxury

Luxury

 

 

Pioneering artist Helen Saunders (1885 – 1963), one of the first British artists to pursue Abstraction whose work fell into obscurity for years, will be celebrated in a new exhibition in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery at The Courtauld this autumn (opening 14 October 2022).

Helen Saunders was one of only two women to join the Vorticists, a radical but short-lived artistic movement that emerged in London on the eve of the First World War, whose members included Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Her extraordinary drawings, which reveal her gifts as a colourist and knack for complex literary allusion, captured the dynamism of modern urban life and the horrors of mechanised warfare. In the years that followed the war she turned her back on Vorticism, pursuing her own path and working in a more figurative style.

Due in part to Vorticism’s post-war fall from favour and to the minimising of her contributions, often by other male Vorticists, as well as the loss of almost all her paintings, Saunders fell into obscurity. Only in recent years has her work begun to be rediscovered and recognised as a vital piece in the story of British modern art.

The drawings trace the artist’s artistic development, from glimpses into her early period as an artist in the orbit of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group.

Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel will be the first monographic exhibition devoted to Helen Saunders in over 25 years. It will showcase a remarkable group of 18 of the artist’s drawings and watercolours, gifted in 2016 by her relative Brigid Peppin, which has transformed The Courtauld into the largest public collection of Saunders’s work in the world.

The drawings trace the artist’s artistic development, from glimpses into her early period as an artist in the orbit of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group, to a landmark group of six drawings from her Vorticist period, as well as landscapes created in L’Estaque in the south of France in the 1920s which reveal Saunders response to her environment and to the art of predecessors who had worked there earlier such as Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque.

The exhibition will be presented in The Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery at The Courtauld from 14 October 2022 – 29 January 2023. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

For more visit www.courtauld.ac.uk

Neue Luxury • Art • News • SHARE

Related Features

    1239
  • Daniel O'Toole

    24 August – 3 September 2022

    Curatorial+ Co. is proud to unveil a vibrant and powerful new collection of works by artist Daniel O’Toole. Inspired by the colours of the natural world, the series is the artist’s response to the pressures of climate change and human survival on a warming planet, within the confines of the digital age. 

  • 1240
  • Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971

    August 21 – April 9 2023

    The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures debuts Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 on August 21, 2022. The ambitious exhibition explores the achievements and challenges of Black filmmakers in the US from cinema’s infancy in the 1890s to the early 1970s.

  • 1242
  • PAUL YORE: WORD MADE FLESH

    September 23 – November 20, 2022

    Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is an extensive survey exhibition encompassing the full scope of the artist’s work, and includes a major new room-scaled installation developed especially for the exhibition.

Share this