London Original Print Fair: Somerset House 2022

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.

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 48.

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 57.

Printed from 4 blocks in raw sienna, spectrum red, alizarin crimson & permanent blue.

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 38.

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 40.

Printed from 5 blocks in ochre, spectrum red, viridian permanent blue & Chinese blue.

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

This is a proof from the Stanley Jones Archive

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’

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.

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.

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, 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

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.”

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga was born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. Sifa graduated her 3rd year in 2020 at Artist Proof Studio in printmaking combining techniques such as intaglio, linocut and silkscreening. Her third year body of work explored the politics surrounding the domestic space and notions of beauty within an Afropolitan context. Sifa’s works in many mediums including painting, collage, drawing, photography.

Sifa wrote, “My work explores beauty constructs as well as its psychological and physical impact on African women through the search of my own identity and those around me. I create moments within domestic spaces which are dialogues between perceived beauty standards, and stereotypes which function to both challenge and embrace African women.”

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.

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.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat no. W5.
Greenwood, Jeremy. The Wood-Engravings of Paul Nash. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Wood Lea Press, 1997. cat no. G5.

Greenwood, Jeremy. The Wood-Engravings of Paul Nash. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Wood Lea Press, 1997. cat no. G103.

Paul Nash first visited the Kent village of Dymchurch in 1919. “A delightful place with much inspiring material for work” he subsequently moved his family there in 1921. The lofty broad seawall protects the low lying and ancient area of Romney Marsh from flooding. Running for six kilometres, nine metres high and six metres wide the monumental wall was originally constructed in Roman times with the great Martello towers added in the Napoleonic era after the threat of invasion. Three sluices gates in the wall allowed the water on the wetland to run out at low tide. Nash, who nearly drowned as a child, wrote of his fear and fascination with the sea; ‘cold and cruel waters, usually in a threatening mood, pounding and rattling along the shore’. This feeling of dread can be sensed in his works of Dymchurch with a strange low evening light casting long shadows.

Leicester Galleries
Major Charles Fair (DSO) and Marjorie Fair (purchased from the above March 1918)

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no 27.

This very rare lithograph was first exhibited at Nevinson’s second exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in March 1918, entitled `War Pictures by CRW Nevinson Official War Artist on the Western Front’, where it was purchased by Major Charles Fair. Commissioned in the 19th London Regiment, he saw significant action during the Battle of the Somme after which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

By the summer of 1916 ‘the Great Push’ referred to the Somme July-November 1916 – after which the term ‘push’ made reference to any British offensive. Familiar with Nash’s scenes of flattened devastation ‘After a Push’ has similarities to Nash’s ‘Mine Crater’ of the previous year. Both artists tackled the problem of depicting scenes of infinite destruction by raising the horizon line and turning the ground into a wall confronting the viewer. Here the eerie ponds that pock mark the infinite landscape merge with the dark heavy sky – the focus on the mud that swallows the dead.

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. 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.

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no 25.

The word ‘reclaimed’ is used here by Nevinson in bitter irony, most likely referring to the scorched earth policy in which retreating German troops would destroy ground including villages, woods and farmland as they retreated.

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. 22.

‘Survivors at Arras’ is a careful architectural composition, of the last two buildings supposedly left standing in the town of Arras after a nearby battle of the same name in April-May 1917. The print was reproduced on the invitation card to Nevinson’s extremely successful April-May 1919 exhibition of war prints at Frederick Keppel & Co in New York.

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.

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

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no 1.

​Exhibited first at Leicester Galleries in 1916 as ​’Ypres after the First Bombardment’

In his time with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) Nevinson was struck by the desolation left in French and Flemish towns. Having depicted the vibrancy of modern life in London before the war, the contrast of wartime devastation was a shocking juxtaposition. During the First Battle of Ypres (19th October – 22 November 1922) he saw heavy shelling. The ancient town was a key strategic position and was heavily fought over throughout the war. Nevinson wrote in his autobiography that he came under fire whilst driving an ambulance to collect wounded from an advanced dressing station in Ypres in November 1914. Ypres after the Second Bombardment was one of Nevinsons first drypoints and was exhibited at Leicester Galleries in September 1916. Paul Nash was so struck by this print when he first saw it in March 1917 that he wrote to his wife from the front to ask her to buy him an impression.

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

I made six prints, one for each decade of Julie’s life. The first one shows her as a young girl on Canvey Island, as it might have looked in the 1950s, with flimsy bungalows, telegraph poles and the refinery belching smoke in the distance. The second is her in a council estate in Basildon, a sexy young rock chick in her hot pants and boots, leaning on a motorbike – a premonition of her own death, perhaps. In the third scene, she’s a young mother picnicking with her two kids in the park. That’s my favourite image, because it captures the poignant trapped feeling of that situation. She was still in her relationship with Dave at the time, but there’s a row of houses in the background and it’s all a bit Larkinesque; I was very much trying to pick up on the atmosphere in Larkin’s poem ‘Afternoon’ where he talks about the young parents in the park: ‘Before them, the wind / Is ruining their courting-places […] Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.’
The fourth image shows Julie with one of her workmates, out on the piss. It’s like a photo-booth portrait of them from the time she’s working as a social worker. The fifth print is a picture of her second wedding. Julie’s got flowers in her hair, and both she and Rob are looking a bit dumpy and middle-aged by now. The final picture is her in front of the Taj Mahal, on one of their trips. When Rob finds that photo after her death, he remembers how he’d promised her that ‘if she died / He would then grieve as deep as Shah Jahan / And build a Taj Mahal upon the Stour’ – a promise which ends in this house being built as her shrine.
I used a set of these prints in black and white as wallpaper on the ceiling of the main room in the house. They are made from blocks cut by a computer-controlled router: they were the first woodcut prints I’ve ever made and I really like the effect of them.

Grayson Perry

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).

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.

Coppel CEP19

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.

Aside from the edition of 150. Published by CCA Galleries

Stanley Jones, the Master Lithographer from Curwen who printed this lithograph for Scott

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.

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.

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.

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.