Untitled (Vorticist Figures)

Although crudely executed, this composition with its bold palette and flattened, pared down figures, undoubtedly dates to Winsten's years at the Slade School of Fine Art (1910-12) and signals her rapid modernist trajectory in this period. The trianglular heads and crossed limbs within a rudimentary hand-drawn grid relate to a more finished work (Liss Fine Art) and suggest that she was working along similar lines to fellow student David Bomberg, who also used the device of figures emerging from a grid several times in contemporaneous works including 'Island of Joy' (c. 1912), 'Vision of Ezekiel' (1912) and, most famously, 'The Mud Bath (1914, Tate). Winsten later abandoned these early experiments but her work continued to move between the figurative and the abstract, though never formally embracing the latter.