Vorticist composition (Black and Khaki?)

Copyright

© Estate of Helen Saunders
Image: Courtauld
ⓒ Work in copyright. All rights reserved.

Maker

(artist)
1885-1963

Title

Vorticist composition (Black and Khaki?)

Date of Production

(circa) 1915

Medium

graphite, black ink, watercolour, bodycolour and collage (elements cut out from a separate sheet and superimposed) with scratching out on wove paper, with pinholes at all four corners

Dimensions

Height: 37.3 cm
Width: 27.8 cm

Object Number

D.2016.XX.16

Mode of Acquisition

Brigid Peppin, gift, 2016

Credit

Courtauld Gallery, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

Location

Not currently on display

Keywords

Label Text

In a shocking visual pun, a figure explodes from the mouth of a rifle, simultaneously victim and gunfire. Saunders’s bold use of collage, in which most of the watercolour has been cut jaggedly from one sheet and pasted down on another, heightens the sense of explosion. This drawing produced in the teeth of war lacks the triumphalism of earlier Vorticist artworks, which celebrated the violent destruction of an old order. Here, the portrayal of violence is complicated by knowledge of its human cost.

Unusually, Saunders signed the drawing. She contributed a work to the Vorticists’ sole London exhibition in 1915 titled ‘Black and Khaki’; this may be the drawing displayed.

Inscriptions

Watermark: Watermark: none.

Inscription: Recto: lower right, black ink, signed with initials: "HS".

Collector's mark: none.

Provenance

with the artist until her death in 1963; bequeathed to her sister, Ethel Saunders; bequeathed to her first cousin once removed, Helen Peppin, 1971; given to her daughter, Brigid Peppin, 1989; offered by her as a gift and part-purchase to the Samuel Courtauld Trust, 2016

Exhibition History

Praxitella: Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and Iris Barry, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, 22/06/2023-05/11/2023
Drawings Gallery Display - Helen Saunders, Courtauld Gallery, London, 14/10/2022-29/01/2023
Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 05/05/2021-23/08/2021
...More
Blasting the future, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 04/02/2004-18/04/2004; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 05/05/2004-25/07/2004
Blast, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 18/08/1996-03/11/1996; Haus der Kunst, Munich, 15/11/1996-26/01/1997
Helen Saunders (1885-1963), Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 09/01/1996-03/03/1996; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 16/03/1996-20/04/1996
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Literature

James King, 'Our Little Gang': The Lives of the Vorticists (London: Reaktion Books, 2025)
pp. 154-157
Women in Abstraction, Centre-Pompidou, Paris 5 May - 23 Aug. 2021 and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2 Oct. 2021 - 27 Feb. 2022
Brigid Peppin, The Thyssen 'Vorticist composition': a new attribution, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 152, no. 1290 (September 2010), 590-594
p. 592
fig. 2 on p. 593
...More
Peppin, Brigid, and Cork, Richard, Helen Saunders (1885-1963), exh. cat., Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Graves Art Gallery ,Sheffield, 1996
p. 45
ill. on p. 33
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