Sybil and Cyril and Claude

Jenny Uglow is one of the finest, most feted biographers of British artistic and literary figures from the 18th and 19th centuries. She has written about William Hogarth, Edward Lear, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Bewick, most of which are available in Devon Libraries (although you might have to be a bit formal in your search, asking for Jennifer Uglow). We also have a fine 5 volume edition of the complete Thomas Bewick engravings in our special collections, published by renowned Victorian bookseller Bernard Quaritch (who we may return to in a future post, since he is an interesting fellow and there are more stack stories to tell about him). Uglow's latest book takes her into the twentieth century, however, and was inspired by a lino-cut print which had hung on the family wall for years, and which she was finally drawn to investigate. Her book reveals the intimately intertwined stories of two artists who used a cheap and readily available material associated with the industrialised world to produce some highly distinctive modernist prints. They were Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and they learned the novel techniques of lino-cutting from an older artist called Claude Flight. 

Down in the stack we have Claude Flight's book on Lino-Cuts, with its eye-catching cover, redolent of 20s design. It could have been the cover of a Hogarth Press book designed by one of the Bloomsbury artists - Vanessa Bell or Duncan Grant. It was indeed first published in the 20s (1927 to be precise) although this is a 1948 reprint. The book is both a how-to guide and a manifesto on the possibilities of the medium; it's ease of use, its flexibility and, importantly, its cheapness. This made it an accessible and democratising medium, in Flight's mind. He includes some charming advice as to how carving tools can be adapted from everyday objects. For instance, there are tips on how the spokes of an umbrella can be modified for use as lino-cutting pattern carvers. Flight emphasises the affordability of lino-cut prints for the less well off, suggesting that 'lino-cut prints could be sold, if only the interest in and the demand for them could be stimulated, at a price which is equivalent to that paid by the average man for his beer or his cinema ticket'. He goes onto proclaim that, with the proper education, people will learn to appreciate new and exciting forms of art beyond the familiar and comforting, and to gain a taste for these new, modern prints. 

The 'average man' with whom he is so concerned 'will realize that the satisfaction to be obtained by their possession has a greater lasting quality than the that derived from the taste and exhilaration of beer or the excitement and comforts from the cinema; knowing also that aesthetic pleasure surmounts creature comforts, and that the harmony, intensity, and the vision which a good work of art affords would be his for the asking'. Having rather superciliously asserted the primacy of modern art over beer and the flicks, Flight, ever the idealist (or maybe ideologue), ends up with a strident passage of proselytising for his newfound medium. 'Linoleum-cut Colour Printing is an art that has come to stay; it cannot, of course, compete with oil or tempera painting in their own field of large mural decorations, it cannot compete with water-colours for the speedy recordings of passing effects of nature, but for the translation and dynamical organisation of nature's forces into a concrete expression, using the superimposition of flat masses of colour and lines to form small pictures, it is a medium that can compete and hold its own with oils, tempera or water-colours'. Alright!

 

Flight came to teach at the Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico in 1925, the year it had been founded by the engraver and teacher Iain Mcnab, with the assistance of his former pupils, fellow teachers and friends Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power. Sybil and Cyril immediately signed on for the course in lino-cut printmaking he was running and were hugely taken with this new, adaptable medium. Flight was a highly engaging teacher, well able to convey his enthusiasm. He was something of a bohemian eccentric as well. During the summer months he spent some of his time living in a cave in France, which lent him a certain local notoriety. He was known as 'the caveman artist'. Flight had been making lino-cuts since the beginning of the '20s and his work was influenced by the Futurists and by the angular planes of Cubism. This was an art for the modern age made with materials from the modern age. Sybil and Cyril answered this modernist clarion call and added decorative elements of Art Deco, with its similar stylisation and streamlining of subject matter.

Flight attracted a number of followers through his charismatic teaching and energetic proselytising. Enough to put on a show of lino-cut art in the Redfern Gallery in 1929. This proved enormously popular and became an annual affair. The popularity of modernist lino-cuts blossomed from this exhibition, and they became an international phenomenon. It was now officially a movement, one which soon gained the appellation The Grosvenor School. In his introduction to our edition of his Lino-Cuts book, Flight writes (from his country village home in Donhead St Andrews, Wiltshire) 'I had the pleasure of organizing the first nine yearly Exhibitions of Lino-Cuts which were held in London galleries starting in 1929. Exhibitions from these have travelled to such distant parts of the world as China and Japan, South Africa, Canada and Australia. The fact that between forty and fifty of our prints have found their way into the permanent collections of our museums and public galleries, and that over fifteen hundred in this short time, and at a price of one and a half to three guineas each, are now on the walls of British homes, proves that a good deal of interest has been taken in the pictorial side of this craft'. 

Sybil and Cyril produced lino-cut work in a number of commercial contexts, including designing posters for the London Underground. Under the forward thinking guidance of Frank Pick, the Underground had become a key locus for modernist design in furnishings, signs, architecture and advertising. Sybil and Cyril created some highly stylish and eyecatching posters for sporting events such as Wimbledon, the Derby and Arsenal football fixtures. You can find them in Oliver Green's excellent book of London Transport poster art, Underground Art, which is down in the stack. Cyril Power had made a number of prints in the 20s using the underground as a subject. You can see his print of a man striding the wrong way up an escalator on the cover of Jenny Uglow's book. Flight himself depicted the omnibus heading down Regents Street as an emblem of speed and modernity, as shown in the colour plate placed adjacent to the title page in the Lino-cuts book. The lino-cut was indeed an ideal medium to depict the heady rush of the interwar years, the rapid advance of technology and the speeding progress of the twentieth century. Claude Flight's little book remains a testimony to the excitement of its formative period.