Across the Atlantic, reverse painting’s heyday had come and gone by the early 1900s. By layering not just paint but also crumpled metal foil over glass, American “tinsel painting” had stretched the limits of technique — but the medium, adopted mainly by middle-class women, was viewed as “feminine”. The craft had come to be seen as hackneyed and outdated, a Victorian throwback, and the twentieth century saw many such paintings “cracked and broken and thrown away”, writes curator Karli Wurzelbacher. But at that very moment, modernist painters began experimenting with the old technique. Artists like Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) and Rebecca Salsbury James (1891–1968) expanded on the traditional themes (flowers, still life, birds) and pushed reverse painting in novel directions: new color palettes, new approaches to line and space, new abstractions. These American experiments, beginning in the 1910s, coincided with Janoszanka’s work in Poland.