IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair Online 2020

Michael Parkin FA, London 
Private Collection, UK
Sally Hunter FA, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 13

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 15.

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue

Redfern Gallery
Private Collection, UK

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age , published by Scolar Press, 1995, no. SA 24
Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue , published by Lund Humphries, no. 26

Printed from 3 blocks in venetian red, viridian & Chinese blue. Signed, titled & numbered TP1 (Trial Proof), aside from the edition of 60

Osborne Samuel, London

Printed from 4 blocks in yellow ochre, spectrum red, permanent blue and black.

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 52.

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 61.

Printed from 4 blocks in spectrum red, viridian, permanent blue and ivory black.

The Artist

Osborne Samuel

Kerr Eby, The Complete Prints, Ed. Bernadette Passi Giardinia, published by M.Hausberg, 1997, no.182

Based on the successful counteroffensive by the Americans against the Germans during the St.Mihiel offensive in September 1918. In describing the event, the Print Collector’s Quarterly of 1939 noted, ‘in the Saint-Mihiel Drive, the great cloud hung for days over the advancing troops, the Germans called it the Cloud of Blood’

Private Collection, Canada

Printed from 4 blocks in blue oil paint, crimson oil paint, viridian printing ink and black printing ink. On oriental laid tinted with a wash of yellow-ochre watercolour, mounted on stiff brown paper backing.

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age , published by Scolar Press, 1995, no. CF A3

From the advertised edition of 500 impressions issued with The Original Colour Print Magazine edited by William Giles. The scarcity of this print would suggest that the edition was never fulfilled.

The Artist
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Private Collection

Starr Figura 61; Sebastian Smee 44; 

Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, published by Modern Art Press, 2022, no. 96, illustrated p.239

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings , 16 Dec 2007 – 10 Mar 2008 (another impression exhibited and illustrated p.92)

The journalist Emily Bearn was the subject of this etching, she was also the sitter to several paintings in 2001-2002.

William Weston, London

Private Collection, UK

Colour linocut on thin Japanese tissue paper

Purchased direct from the Publisher, David Krut Fine Art Editions
Private Collection, USA

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, p. 66.

The Sleeper series speaks to one of Kentridge’s main themes, the desire to forget or shield oneself from challenging or problematic realities of history and the present day. Works such as the Sleeper series explore the white South African psyche and the relationship to it’s history of exploitation during the period in which the system of apartheid was first contested and then dismantled. Sleep here stands for the state of ‘blissful ignorance’, a preoccupation with the internal and domestic, allowing the public and political world to be forgotten. However a sleeper will always wake, and it is this moment of self-knowledge and recognition that Kentridge returns to in his work.

The ‘Ubu Tells the Truth’ etchings were the starting point for a theatre production ‘Ubu & the Trust Commission’ (1997). The Sleeper prints were made after the theatre production was completed. I had worked on a series of messy drawings of a naked man, sometimes enclosed by the white Ubu line drawing, trying to get some of the feel of the theatre production in them. With the first set of drypoints I had used a thumbprint and printed the heel of my hand to suggest the flesh texture. With the large drawings one has to pull shape and texture into the drawing on a larger scale. I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit with a charcoal-impregnated silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment. The Sleeper prints used a range of materials and objects placed in soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper.

Private Collection, UK

Printed from 4 blocks in permanent blue, viridian green, ochre & pale chrome

One of the most notable achievements of the linocut artists is the way they choreographed the pleasurable, life affirming and healthful activities of the public’s often increasingly available leisure time. In the 1930’s, despite England’s post war political and financial uncertainties, the pursuit of leisure became a widespread social phenomenon. The Grosvenor School artists chose subject matters such as dancing, rowing on the river, swimming, bathing, gymnastic exercises, playing musical instruments, attending concerts, eating with friends and family, playing boules, sitting at a café, skating, skiing, playing rugby, football and ice hockey – whilst invariably retaining a cutting edge.

 Lawrence’s 1929 linocut The Cricket Match, has an enchantingly naïve fluidity, playfully manipulating hard-edged geometric forms. The simple use of perspective on the cricket pitch, the angular lines of the figures and the field, all adeptly conjures up an impression of the game’s speedy agility and quick changes of fortune, the cricketing whites themselves evoked through lucid areas of blank, unprinted paper.

From the album `Meditations on the Effigy’

Signed and numbered from the edition of X, one of ten artist’s proofs aside from the edition of 50

Private Collection, UK

Gérald Cramer (ed.) Alistair Grant & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore. The Graphic Work, 1931-72, vol. I, London, 1973, no.14, illustrated.

Based on a drawing Standing Figures 1948.

Private Collection, UK

Henry Moore and the Challenge of Architecture , published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, catalogue no.3, page 6

David Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Prints and Portfolios, published by Patrick Cramer, Geneva, 2010, p.11, illustrated fig, 3

Henry Moore Foundation, Henry Moore and the Challenge of Artchitecture, Perry Green Much Hadham, 2005

c.1920

One of only 3 recorded impressions. (the Henry Moore Foundation acquired one of the three copies in 1985)

Dancing Figures is a rare and early linocut from c.1920, created as an idea for an architectural frieze and conveys a sense of movement and dynamism among the stylized figures, giving a clear insight into Moore’s creative process at a time when he started his earliest explorations of architectural concepts.

On returning to Castleford, his Yorkshire home town, in February 1919 after demobilisation at the end of the First World War, Moore joined the pottery classes of his former art teacher Alice Gostick, before going in September that year to Leeds School of Art as a sculpture student. Though studying in Leeds Moore continued to live in Castleford and to spend some evenings at Alice Gostick’s classes. Dancing Figures c.1920, a linoleum print on olive-green wove paper measuring 165 x 344mm, dates from this period.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat.no. L5.

Encouraged by artist and lecturer, William Rothenstein, Sir Michael Sadler attended an exhibition at Dorien Leigh Gallery in 1915 and purchased two works by Paul Nash. A friend and collector of Wassily Kandinsky, he was the President of the radical Leeds Art Club, and a great champion of modern art in Britain. As a long-standing client of the Leicester Galleries (they had an exhibition of his print collection in 1944) it is probable that this print was purchased, along with ‘A Shell Bursting, Passchendaele’, from the gallery, conceivably from the 1918 ‘Void of War’ exhibition.

The subject of ‘German Double Pill Box, Gheluvelt’ is the aftermath of an offensive in the battle of Passchendaele. Among the units involved were the 15th Hampshires, whom Nash would join in early 1917. In the battle the unit were ordered to seize a position close to the German position of Tower Hamlets, an area of camouflaged concrete ‘pill-box’ machine gun posts. In letters to the British War Memorials Committee Nash described the subject that also inspired his monumental work, ‘The Menin Road’:

The picture shows a tract of country near Gheluvelt village in the sinister district of ‘Tower Hamlets’, perhaps the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War.

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no 9.

During his time both as an ambulance driver and with the Red Cross, Nevinson was captivated by the dense lines of marching French soldiers seemingly moving as one. Informed by the Futurist techniques for depicting movement, seen in such works a Boccioni’s ‘The City Rises’ and ‘States of Mind’, the French soldiers in ‘Returning to the Trenches’ merge into one unified mechanical mass, their limbs blurring together, giving one the impression of a speeding train disappearing into the distance. In his autobiography Nevinson stated that these soldiers may have been part of the French 89th territorial division, and in the oil painting of the same subject the early French uniform is distinctive with its impractical red cap. In an interview with The Daily Express in February 1915 where the painting was reproduced he stated:

“I have tried to express the emotion produced by the apparent ugliness and dullness of modern warfare. Our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe … Modern art needs not beauty, or restraint, but vitality.”

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints.
London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no. 21.

NEVINSON AND ‘MAKING AIRCRAFT’

‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals’ was a series of prints published by the Department of Information, the wartime propaganda wing of the government. The prints were intended to be widely distributed and exhibited to boost morale and encourage support for the British war effort. Nevinson was selected for the topic of ‘Making Aircraft’ a new element of modern warfare. Each print was published in editions of 200 signed and a further 100 unsigned impressions. ‘Efforts’, such as Nevinson’s series, were sold for £2 2s (£100 today) and ‘Ideals’, symbolic subjects, for £3 3s (£154 today). Art critic P.G. Konody wrote of Nevinson’s lithographs in the Observer; “To look at his flying pictures is to share his experience of swooping through the air. Here are all the essentials of movement, of exhilaration, of the victory of human intelligence over the forces of nature and these essentials are detached from their insignificant and disturbing details.” The series was exhibited at the Fine Art Society in early July 1917 and went on to tour Britain, France, American, Canada and Australia, launching Nevinson’s international career as a printmaker. 

Here a British plane dives towards an enemy plane, nicknamed a ‘Taube’, meaning ‘dove’, so called because its outline is curved like that of a bird.

Nevinson first produced his bayonet design for the poster for his own show of paintings at the Leicester Galleries, March, 1918, entitled “War”, illustrated in Edward Bayes’s “The Underworld: Taking cover in a Tube Station during a London air raid” in the Imperial War Museum collection. Nevinson later adapted the design and the accompanying text for a poster issued by the National War Savings Committee to promote the raising of funds.

The remarkable design depicts massed fixed bayonets printed in orange against a bright yellow background. The bold design and the superimposition of the black stylized text against a field of fiery colour variants is arresting. Image and text are successfully integrated through the elaboration of an appropriately cubist letterform, whose spikey design echoes the raised bayonets, rendered with mathematical precision.

Furthermore, Nevinson’s design exemplifies the optical disturbance associated with “dazzle” effects, those made possible by combining the geometric experimentation of cubism with the simplifications of the Japanese woodcut of the Ukiyo-e (floating world). In poster terms, dazzle effects were deployed to attract the eye against an increasingly hectic background of metropolitan spectacular. Large-scale dazzle effects were famously used by Norman Wilkinson and colleagues to camouflage shipping.

The cultural significance of Nevinson’s poster cannot be overstated. Looking back over the artistic experimentation of the 20th century, the consistent recurrence of dazzle and strobe effects points to the power of this design as a major breakthrough.

The subject of men marching was a recurring theme with both Nash and Nevinson. Here however, rather than the soldiers marching in single file, as we can see in ‘Returning to the Trenches’, they are turned, either marching shoulder to shoulder pushing the enemy back, or bayonets raised in celebration. The same image was used in an earlier poster ‘Now the Bayonets Have Won Through’.

The posters were designed to encourage the purchasing of War Savings Certificates, a way of attracting war financing from the home population.

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no. 55.

First exhibited in his October 1919 solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, ‘Temples of New York’ depicts the steeple of Trinity Church in the centre of the financial heart of New York. The angle suggests that Nevinson may have been looking out from the recently completed Equitable Building. Nevinson may well have seen this view before the war. In 1913 the Goupil Gallery in London held an exhibition of photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn featuring sharp angled views of the skyscrapers of New York including a view of the Trinity Church spire. Nevinson would most likely have been aware of the work as his friend H.G. Wells wrote the introductory essay for the catalogue. Ambivalent about the power wielded by the financial sector in New York, Nevinson depicts the spire, the tallest building in New York until the 1890s, dominated by the new skyscrapers, the very symbol of capitalism.

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no. 77.

Used as the cover image for the catalogue at Bourgeois Galleries, New York, 1920, ‘New York: An Abstraction’ may be based on a stretch of elevated railway that ran along Third Avenue. The wall of skyscrapers and the train tracks dominate the composition, leaving no space for human beings, described by Jonathan Black as “New York’s somewhat inhuman architectural dynamism”. Nevinson later renamed the oil painting of the same subject, ‘The Soul of a Soulless City’ – indicative of the artist’s now distinctly negative view of the city.

Coppel CEP19

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. CEP 10.

Vann, Philip. Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2013). no. 10.

Private Collection, Australia

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Linocuts of the Machine Age , Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, ES 13, p.170

Printed from 3 blocks in emerald green, cobalt blue & mauve.

This very rare print by Spowers shows the plough going from right to left. There is a later edition of 50 of the same subject reversed titled ‘Birds Following a Plough’ also in an edition of 50 in 1933 (see Coppel ES 26). There is also a woodcut of the same subject made in 1929.

The Redfern Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK

Linocuts of the Machine Age , Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, ES 14, p.170-171

Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilsons Publishers, , 2019, p.53

Printed from four blocks in grey, reddish brown, emerald green & Cobalt blue.

Linocuts of the Machine Age, Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, LT24

Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilsons Publishers, , 2019, p.87

Printed from 3 blocks in dark blue, light brown & light blue.

Lill Tschudi was a Swiss artist (1911-2004) from the town of Schwanden in the municipality of Glarus. She saw an advertisement in The Studio magazine for classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London and enrolled there in December 1929.  She stayed for six months, learning a revolutionary new method of linocutting taught by the charismatic Claude Flight, a teacher and artist who ran a course on Tuesday afternoons. Tschudi became a good friend of Flight’s and his companion the artist Edith Lawrence. Her linocuts like many of her fellow students who attended Flight’s classes are concerned with rhythm, velocity and dynamism of modern life of the Jazz Age.

Sailor’s Holiday shows a group of sailors printed in blues, black and brown, the white being part of the blocks that are left uncut and un-inked. It is not known where the scene is but after her time in London Flight suggested she go to Paris to broaden her work.  She spent two months there each year and studied under Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote and Gino Severini. The image suggest Paris as the location; the central figure looks like an accordion player perhaps.  The linocut was made in an edition of 50 in the 1930s but a second edition was begun in 1984 for the US market on the strength of the revival of interest in the Grosvenor School linocuts.  This second edition is annotated ‘USA’ and numbered from 50 as well.

Linocuts of the Machine Age , Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, LT50, p.141
Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilsons Publishers, , 2019, p.63

Printed from 2 blocks in black and red on thin cream oriental laid paper.

Private Collection
Lord Timothy Willoughby of Eresby (grandson of Nancy Astor)

Colnaghi catalogue 130

The SS Jerseymoor is an exquisite woodcut of 1918, a classic image for a Vorticist artist like Wadsworth who helped in the design of ‘ dazzle camouflage’ during WW1

In 1917 Edward Wadsworth was hired to oversee the application of ‘dazzle’ patterning to ships in the Liverpool and Bristol dockyards. Dazzle camouflage was devised as a means of frustrating the attempts of German U-boat commanders to calculate the exact course and speed of an allied merchantman. By breaking up the outline of the hull with irregular patterns painted in stark colours, a ship became more difficult to target accurately, reducing its chances of a direct and fatal hit by torpedo. During 1918 nearly 2500 ships were being painted at any one time and the results of this dazzle camouflage were successful to the war effort and something to which Wadsworth was very proud.
For a Vorticist artist these ‘dazzle’ ships with their cubist informed patterning were an obvious subject matter. In ‘S.S. Jerseymoor’ Wadsworth created a pictorial equivalent of the ‘dazzle’, conflating the diverging diagonals of the barrels in the foreground with the striped ship, rigging, warehouses and cranes in the middle-distance. The result is dynamic and visually disorientating, perhaps not too dissimilar in effect to the view of a dazzled ship glimpsed from a U-boat periscope.