Michalina Janoszanka’s Reverse Paintings (c. 1920) – The Public Domain Review

Across the Atlantic, the heyday of reverse painting was over by the early 20th century. By applying not just paint but also crumpled metal foil over glass, American tinsel painting had pushed the boundaries of the technique – but the medium, used mainly by middle-class women, was considered ‘feminine’. The craft was seen as hackneyed and outdated, a Victorian throwback, and by the twentieth century many such paintings were ‘cracked and broken and thrown away’. writes curator Karli Wurzelbacher. But at that time, modernist painters began to experiment with the old technique. Artists such as Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) and Rebecca Salsbury James (1891–1968) expanded on traditional themes (flowers, still life, birds) and pushed reverse painting in new directions: new color palettes, new approaches to line and space, new abstractions. These American experiments, which began in the 1910s, coincided with Janoszanka’s work in Poland.