Jessie Dismorr- Rhythm

I thought some people might appreciate an update on my search for the artist and writer Jessie Dismorr. When I posted in January the only glimpse in to Dismorr's history and her potential corpus of work was an article written by a journalist called Mark Archer about his own difficult search for traces of Jessie. Thanks to a combination of social media and their respective powers, but largely thanks to Reddish, I succeeded in tracking down a PHD thesis which catalogues all of Dismorr's work, traces her genealogy and darts across various archives to map out her life. My favourite discovery has been that the Vorticist artist,whose work in Blast! is based on the bold, violent, abstract lines of machines, began by drawing Romantic female nudes. So here are some startling surprises stolen from an online version of the modernist magazine, Rhythm.

In Rhythm Dismorr was publishing alongside figures such as Pablo Picasso, Katherine Mansfield and a circle of artists connected to the Russian Ballet. This certainly gives her a stronger independent context than historians of Wyndham Lewis might suggest. The bold lines remain but they have an organic solidity. I imagine them as pseudo-pre-raphaelite or Alfons Mucha style stained glass panels. All that romanticism and folly which the Vorticists condemn is a lyrical statement here. An exploration of Dismorr's contexts reveals just how nuanced her approach to various modernist manifestos might be. Now I know I can write my dissertation on her.