Charlotte Hobson

Bright, beautiful and deceptively simple: the art of the linocut

Jenny Uglow celebrates the dynamic images of everyday life produced by Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews in the interwar years

‘The Eight’ by Cyril Power (1930). Credit: Bridgeman Images

In the 1920s the linocut broke out of the schoolroom and on to gallery walls. Here was a democratic new art form, perfect for the times with its lowly materials — a piece of old linoleum flooring for the block, while the best tools, according to the artist Claude Flight, were an old umbrella spoke for cutting and a toothbrush to rub the back of the paper. The finished prints, Flight hoped, would be cheap enough for working-class pockets.

Above all, the bright, dynamic images themselves, often depicting scenes of contemporary life — busy streets, the London Underground, skating, the first motor races — captured the mood of the age. Influenced by the Futurists, the style was thrillingly modern, with its subjects simplified to near abstraction and its focus on speed, rhythm and pattern. Jenny Uglow’s excellent, vividly illustrated new book tells the story of two of the most talented practitioners of the art, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews.

Cyril was an architect in his late forties when he met the 21-year-old Sybil. Within a year he had left his wife and four children to begin their two-decade-long artistic collaboration. They shared a studio and a diary, wrote and exhibited together, printed each other’s designs and sometimes even developed each other’s preliminary sketches. This impressive lack of artistic ego speaks of love; and indeed Uglow convincingly argues that theirs was far more than a professional partnership. The pair spent almost every moment together, taking equal delight in music, theatre and medieval history. While Sybil made jam and iced Christmas cakes, Cyril (known as ‘JM’ — Jest Master) played his growing collection of instruments and wrote jokey poems to commemorate their feasts.

They shared a studio, a diary and each other’s designs, and the impressive lack of ego speaks of love

One of their concerns was to define this new art of linocuts.

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