IFPDA Print Fair: New York

Osborne Samuel, London
Private collection Italy
Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 9

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 11.

White, Peter: Sybil Andrews – Colour Linocuts/Linogravures en couleur, Calgary 1982,
cat. rais. no. 9

Lumley Cazalet Gallery, London
Private British Collection
Private collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Konody, Observor, June 4, 1933, p.10

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, published by Scolar Press, 1995, SA 27, p.113

Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, published by Lund Humphries in Association with Osborne Samuel, 2015, no.29, p.75

London, Redfern Gallery, 1933, no.46

Melbourne, 1937, no.43

Linocut printed on buff oriental oriental laid tissue in 3 blocks: Chinese orange; permanent blue; Chinese blue

The Windmill was inspired by Elmers Mill, an old Suffolk post windmill at the village of Woolpit, near Bury St Edmunds. The mill is also the subject of Cyril Power’s first known linocut, Elmer’s Mill, Woolpit (1921).

From 4 blocks, printed in chrome yellow, red, permanent blue & Chinese blue.

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

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 58.

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 67.

Printed from 3 blocks in terra rosa, terre verte and permanent blue.

The Artist

Osborne Samuel

The Artist

Osborne Samuel

Based on the successful counteroffensive by the Americans against the Germans at St.Mihiel Drive ( a town in northeastern France) in September 1918, the area between the trenches of the opposing sides was known as ‘No Man’s Land’.

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.

Private Collection, USA

Craig Hartley 55; Starr Figura 76

Sarah Howgate 123; Sebastian Smee 1

William Feaver 66; Yale 41

Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, published by Modern Art Press, 2022, No. 80, illustrated p.207

London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 9 Feb – 27 May 2012, illustrated p.197, another impression

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, 16 Dec 2007 – 10 Mar 2008, illustrated p. 76, another impression

Lucian Freud was one of the most significant portraitists of the last century, acclaimed Internationally. His portraits are both ruthless, coldblooded examinations and yet also intimate and impartial. This seemingly contradictory approach stemmed from seeing himself as “a sort of biologist”, interested in “the insides and undersides of things.” ₁

He refused to work from photographs as he stated, “the aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell.”₂ Sitters had to be patient and prepared to be nocturnal, so inevitably this led to self-portraits. Freud depicted mirror images of himself throughout the breadth of his career and often referred to this process in titles, such as in the etching, Self-Portrait: Reflection. 

This etching is an extraordinary portrait and display of technical command, the artist as in so many portraits, naked, filling the large plate from the chest upwards. Freud stood his copper plates upright on an easel from the mid 1980’s onwards and found he was able to work with greater force and fluidity. He claimed to find etching easier than drawing.

Self-Portrait: Reflection is uncompromising, the irregularities of the surface and lack of balance to his features are laid bare. The artist’s eyes scarcely visible but piercing, self-examining and yet also boring into the viewer.  

Freud stated, “Many people are inclined to look at portraits not for the art in them but to see how they resemble people. This seems to me a profound misunderstanding.” ₃

Frank Auerbach began to unravel this ‘misunderstanding’ in the Tate catalogue that accompanied Freud’s retrospective of 2002:

‘When I think of the work of Lucian Freud, I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter he would come off his tightrope; he has no safety net of manner. Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil and finds a procedure more suited to his needs.I am never aware of the aesthetic paraphernalia. The subject is raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art, not covered in a gravy of ostentatious tone or colour, nor arranged on the plate as a ‘composition.’ The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.’₄

₁ Royal Academy Blog, 22^nd October 2019
₂ Lucian Freud: A Life, David Dawson and Mark Holborn, published by Phaidon, 2019
₃ Freud cited in Cape, J., Freud at Work, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2006, p. 32
₄ William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Tate Publishing, 2002, p.51

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.

Private Collection, London

Osborne Samuel Gallery, London

Issued for the Hockney Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1970
Printed by Ernest Donoagh at Cook Hammond and Kell in London. Published by Petersburg Press.
Scottish Arts Counil 115

Private Collection, USA

Scottish Arts Council 127
David Hockney: Prints 1954-1995, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 1996, no.  119, p.91

Total edition includes 15 proofs and 60 in Roman numerals. Printed on Crisbrook handmade paper. Proofed by Maurice Payne in London and printed from a chrome faced plate by Shirley Clement at the Print Shop, Amsterdam.

This still-life of a coat hanging off the back of a bentwood chair, with a panama hat, pipe and empty glass on the seat, depicts the personal effects of Hockney’s great friend and early champion, Henry Geldzahler (1935-1994), then curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum. Geldzahler was a regular sitter for Hockney.

Printed on Hahnemuhle natural white paper.

Puleng Mongale (b. 1991) uses her vivid collages as a way to connect with her Sotho heritage. Having originally studied communications science and English at the University of South Africa, as well as pursuing copywriting at Umuzi, a creative hub based in Jeppestown, she decided to explore the art world more seriously. 

Mongale’s artistic expression is mostly influenced by the stories of the women in her life; women who raised her and women in her family who she has heard about but never met, such as her late great-grandmother, after whom she is named. She also draws inspiration from the black, working-class women she encounters daily in the city.

Working in digital collage, Mongale explores her identity through an internal dialogue that revolves around a re-imagined history, the establishment and maintenance of ancestral relationships, black womanhood, and re/claiming her heritage. 

Mongale finds that her collage work, through self-portraiture, allows her to put together pieces of worlds she’s never been a part of and worlds that she’s trying to forge right now. Her imagined, photoshopped landscapes are vivid renderings of a life she yearns for. She says living in Johannesburg has always made her feel slightly displaced: “Joburg is an eclectic mix of cultures but is somehow dominated by one particular culture/language.”

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.

William Weston purchased print from a member of staff at WS Cowell Ltd, where the trial proofs had been printed.

Gérald Cramer (ed.) Alistair Grant & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore. The Graphic Work, 1931-72, vol. I, London, 1973, no.8, illustrated.

This exceptionally rare trial proof was Moore’s earliest experiment in lithography. When he agreed to make a print for Brenda Rawnsley’s ‘School Print’ project, the printers sent the artist two plates to draw on. A very small number of trial proofs of the two resulting images (CGM 6 and 8) were printed by Cowells and no edition was made. The subjects in this print are typical of Moore’s work at the time, exploring the seated figure, the family group and the mother and child theme. The texts adjacent to the images (in reverse) are Moore’s notes on the technical aspects of this new medium.

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.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat. no. L3.

Zillebeke is a village south of Ypres, Belgium. In November 2014, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards suffered huge losses defending the village which played a pivotal role in preventing the Central Powers breaking through to the coast. By the time Nash arrives on the Ypres Salient in early 1917, the landscape has seen much heavy shelling and the ground is impassable. Here, a spotlight lights the scene, with figures walking with heads bowed through the rain, the light shining off the waterfilled craters and the lake beyond. The broken tree trunks stand like tomb stones as symbols of the fallen.

Signed, dated & numbered from the edition of 200

Part of the series Britain’s Efforts and Ideals: Making Aircraft

Ref: Black 20

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.

Keppel Galleries, New York 1919 

Manchester City Art Gallery, July 1920

‘His first attempt at mezzotint, the compelling ‘From an Office Window’ was made from a design derived from an oil painting first exhibited in April 1917 at the Friday Club from which it was promptly bought by the poet Osbert Sitwell. ‘From an Office Window’ was one of a small number of mezzotints held in London earlier in 1918 heralded a general and positive reassessment of the medium.’ – Black, CRW Nevinson: The Complete Prints, p.42

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.

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. 59.

After the war, civil unrest broke out across the country in major cities as unions fought to establish basic rights such as a forty- hour week for a now over-populated work force. The towering black square of the dockyard warehouse in Southwark with the backdrop of a stormy sky, emphasises the protesting workers’ threat to the status quo.

Jonathan Black, C.R.W. Nevinson The Complete Prints, London, 2014, p.
142, no. 52

First exhibited Senefelder Club, Leicester Galleries, London, January 1919

At almost poster-size, Wet Evening, Oxford Street (1919) is the largest of Nevinson’s lithographs. Its composition is thus all the more arresting: heads and umbrellas stretching back into the distance, cheek by jowl, ever more indistinguishable as they recede. Striking, too, is the fragmentation of faces – screened, averted, anonymised. The woman nearest to the lower edge is reduced to one eye beneath a stylish hat; the  gentleman on her left, to a half-visible moustache. The newspaper seller above is surmised only by his open mouth and fanned merchandise, held by unseen hands.

Exhibited first with the Senefelder Club at the Leicester Galleries in January 1919, Wet Evening, Oxford Street was shown in May at New York’s Keppel Gallery, where the reviewer expounded on the print’s scale and ‘technical excellence’:

In one of the more important lithographs in the exhibition … the artist has taken a rainy day in Oxford Street, London – or some other street, it doesn’t matter – and made of its raised umbrellas, its downpour of rain, its white faces under the dark domes of the umbrellas, its artificial lights in the street, a composition in which Renoir’s method of composing with light and the method of the Cubists of composing with lines and flat planes are brilliantly combined.¹

Nevinson’s command of the medium is indeed impressive, demonstrated above all in the rendering of light and texture: the softness of textiles, sheen of wet umbrellas, glow from the window and pendant lights.

¹ ‘Lithographs by C.R.W. Nevinson: Art at Home and Abroad’, New York Times (25 May 1919), p. 83

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Etching from five plates, printed on one sheet.

‘The starting point for this print was Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia is a pun on the Greek ou topos meaning ‘no place’. ‘I was playing with the idea of there being no Heaven. People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence.
But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum.’ [1]

Prints are no secondary art form for Grayson Perry, they are considered, large-scale final pieces. A vocal advocate of therapy and analysis, in the Map of Nowhere Perry explores his own belief system; His opinions contend with those he finds crowding around him in wider society. The print’s grand proportions encompass the artist’s taste for niggling detail.
Perry started the drawing in the top left-hand corner, and worked towards the bottom right-hand corner, without planning the in-between; instead ideas were allowed to emerge, leading from one to another, through the drawing process.

As also seen in his subsequent major etchings, Map of an Englishman (2004) or his ‘playscape’, Print for a Politician (2005), Perry prefers to leave ink on the plate during the printing process; he avoids creating too crisp an image in order to evoke an antique look. Perry is yoking his map to its historical pedigree. With this etching, Perry is working from a big historical model rather than one from fine art: the medieval mappa mundi (map of the world) provides a recognisable template. As pre-Columbian diagrams, they would illustrate a sum of knowledge, acting as both instructive and decorative objects, making connections vivid and comprehensible. The Map of Nowhere is based on a famous German example, the Ebstorf Map, which was destroyed in the Second World War. It showed Jesus as the body of the world, with his head, hands
and feet marking four equidistant points around the circle.

Perry spikes the tradition with contemporary social comment. Within a circular scheme, like the Ebstorf Map, or the existent Hereford Mappa Mundi (www.herefordcathedral.org), he presents a flattened-out analysis of his world – from jibes about current affairs to the touchstones of his personal life. Where the Ebstorf Map has the world unfolding around Jerusalem, Perry’s personal world view encompasses a cacophony of ideas and preoccupations, with ‘Doubt’ right at the centre. The artist’s alter ego Claire gets a sainthood, while people pray at the churches of global corporations: Microsoft, Starbucks, Tescoes. Tabloid cliches abound, each attached to a figure or building: ‘the new black’, ‘kidults’, ‘binge drinking’, having-it-all’. Top right, the ‘free-market-economy’ floats untethered, preempting the credit crunch that was to take hold in the autumn of 2008. All-over labels demand that the map is read – or quizzed – close up. This is a clearly articulated satire, and while Perry adopts a medieval confusion of scale and proportion, the diagrammatic style is as adamant as its religious forerunners. Beneath, there is a drawing of figures on a pilgrimage, set in a realistic landscape. They are at final staging post before making their way up to a monastery at the top of a mountain beyond, which is hit by
a beam of light, coming from the artist’s bottom.

[1] Jackie Klein, Grayson Perry (Thames and Hudson, London 2009), p.162

Coppel CEP19

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue – Philip Vann, published by Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel Gallery, 2008. Catalogue No 27
Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School – Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, Farnham, 1995, Catalogue No CEP 27

Printed in 5 blocks in 1) light yellow ochre; 2) transparent golden ochre; 3) spectrum red; 4) permanent blue (oil paint); 5) Chinese blue (oil paint).

Private collection, UK

Coppel, Stephen, Linocuts of the Machine Age, published by Scolar Press, 1995, CEP 32, p.99 
Vann, Philip, Rhythms of Colour and Light: The Linocut Art of Cyril Power (1872-1951), published by Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, no.32, p.85

Modernity : British Colour Linocuts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, 21 November 1999- 16 January 2000.
Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 30 January – 1st June 2008; Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York, 23 September – 7 December 2008; Wolfsonian, Florida International University, 29 November 2009 – 28 February 2010
The Linocut Art of Cyril Power, Osborne Samuel, 2008

Machine-age London and its modern transport system became a central subject for the Grosvenor School artists. The expanding London Underground, the cities’ red buses and the reliable rush-hour crowds provided the artists with dynamic and contemporary subject matter. The Underground in particular was a favoured venue for Cyril Power, who recorded the escalators full of featureless commuters descending; a tube train carriage with its passengers, some strap-hanging, others claustrophobically seated with reticent English demeanour reading their newspapers; a Greenline bus with an open ‘sunshine’ roof or the swing-boats at funfairs were immortalised by Claude Flight and his followers.

The Tube Station made by Power in 1932 is one of his best known and collected linocuts. It is printed in five colours from five linoleum blocks on a thin oriental tissue paper. In total there were 120 impressions printed; the edition was numbered 1/60 – 60/60 in pencil and signed. The US edition such as this impression was inscribed USA Ed 1/60 – 60/60. 

Power’s notes identify this as Bank Underground station which is named after the Bank of England and opened in 1900. It is served by the Central, Northern and Waterloo & City lines.  Here we see the iconic red London tube train as distinctive as the red London double-decker buses as it leaves the station waved off by the guard.  Its passengers are seen through the four windows, probably buried in the morning newspapers.  The curve of the roof is accentuated by the pattern and rhythm of the architecture, the fixtures of the indicator boards and the convex mirror that enabled the tube driver to see the platform.

Cyril Power was one of a group of artists that studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art under the guidance of their teacher Claude Flight, in London’s Pimlico district near Victoria Station.  Their imagery and the execution were at the cutting-edge of contemporary printmaking in the 1930s and is now widely collected and is some of the world’s greatest museums from the British Museum to New York’s Museum of Modern Art where there is a room dedicated to the Grosvenor school linocuts.

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.

Stephen Coppel, ‘Linocuts of the Machine Age,’ published by Scolar Press, 1995, p. 129, LT 4

Additionally signed and titled in pencil in the lower margin

This study of Waterloo Tube station derives from an exercise at the Grosvenor School. Cyril Power, who lectured at the School, was also making his first linocuts inspired by the London Underground at this time.

The Estate of the Artist

The Graphic Work of Edward Wadsworth, Jeremy Greenwood with an introduction by Richard Cork, The Woodlea Press, Woodbridge, England, 2002, Greenwood W/D 8/3, p.28/29

J. Greenwood, The Graphic work of Edward Wadsworth, published by Wood Lea Press, 2002, p.19, no.W/D 2

Colnaghi 99, Tate Memorial 88, Adelphi 3

Colnaghi & Greenwood do not record any signed impressions of this rare woodcut.

Shortly after the publication of the first volume  of Blast in the summer of 1914, Wadsworth and his wife visited several ports in the Netherlands. It seems likely that it was during this trip that they visited Vlissingen (known as Flushing) on the Dutch bank at Westerschelde, the channel that connects Antwerp to the North Sea.

Harbour of Flushing shows confidence and an ability to tackle organisational complexity. We are never sure, looking at this compressed image, where the harbour ends and the weapon-sharp forms of the ships begin. Ezra Pound, who gave Vorticism its name and quickly established himself as its main critical champion, equated Harbour of Flushing’s ‘very fine organisation of form’ with music: ‘There is a definite, one might say a musical or a music-like pleasure for the eye in noting the arrangement of the very acute triangles combined “like notes in a fugue.” But there is no doubt at all about Wadsworth’s insistence on absolute, clean-cut finality. He maintained that the woodcut ‘appeals to me more than any of the other similar medium (etchings, lithographs, mezzotints etc.) precisely because ‘it leaves nothing at all to accident.’

Extract taken from Richard Cork’s introduction in ‘The Graphic Work of Edward Wadsworth’ compiled by Jeremy Greenwood, published by Wood Lea Press, 2002, p.9

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.