Study - Cafe Tables

Atkinson was one of the first British painters to work in a purely abstract mode. He joined Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists in 1914 and exhibited with them in 1915. Vorticism expressed the fragmented nature of modern experience through restless and insistent diagonal lines, zig-zag patterns and machine forms. This watercolour is unusual for Atkinson as it shows him transition from the representation of a real scene towards total abstraction.