Driving force

Located in a rambling Victorian house in the Pimlico area of London, the Grosvenor School of Modern Art functioned for only 15 years, from 1925 until 1940. It had no formal curriculum. Its premises – home of its founder, the Scottish printmaker Iain Macnab (1890-1967) – were large by domestic standards, but tiny for an academic institution. One of the students (of whom there can’t have been very many) also served as school secretary. Yet, despite the brevity of its existence, the Grosvenor was one of those art educational institutions that become synonymous with a particular approach and style, and in this case a particular medium: the linocut.

The giddily futuristic, brilliantly coloured prints of a small group of artists associated with the school, who became known, appropriately enough, as the Grosvenor School, were ignored for decades after their brief interwar heyday, before being rediscovered in the 1980s. They are now much sought after by collectors. An important group of Grosvenor School prints, featuring signature works by all the key figures (notably Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, but also Swiss artist Lill Tschudi and one of three intriguing Australian women from the school: Ethel Spowers) are being offered in Bonhams’ The Age of Speed – The Grosvenor School and the Avant-garde sale in London. It provides an opportunity to delve into a compelling, but still little understood byway of 20th-century British art.

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Macnab, a wood engraver by training, was one of those distinctively British figures – Bernard Leach was another – with a passion to renew their craft in a modern context. In 1925, Macnab was joined by Claude Flight (1881-1955). Another, equally driven printmaker, Flight was on a mission, after abortive careers as an engineer and a farmer, to expand the creative possibilities of a medium that was then only some two decades old.

Patented in 1860 as a floor covering, linoleum was discovered in the early 20th century by German Expressionist and Russian Constructivist artists as a cheaper alternative to traditional woodcut printing. What the softer lino lacked in woodcut’s distinctive grain, it made up for in fluidity in mark-making and ease of use. Flight, who had been a member of the radical abstract Seven and Five Group with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, was excited by the possibility of creating modern art cheap enough for ordinary people, and which being ‘necessarily small’ – linocuts can’t be too large – would work well in scaled-down modernist interiors.

Even more of an aesthetic spur was a comment made to Flight by F.B. Marinetti, Italian founder of the Futurist movement, when the pair met in London in 1912. Futurism was the first art movement to celebrate the frenetic pace and energy of modern urban life. Marinetti was impressed by the speed and efficiency of the London underground system, but bemused, as he noted to Flight, that British artists never even attempted to depict it. This clearly stuck in Flight’s mind, for when he began teaching at the Grosvenor School well over a decade later, he encouraged his students to tackle the machine-age dynamism of everyday life – not least the Tube – in images that combined the speed-addicted energy of classic Futurism with a distinctively English decorative sensibility.

Cyril Power (1872-1951) was older than Flight, at 53. A trained architect, he had helped set up the Grosvenor School, but nonetheless took part in Flight’s printmaking classes, responding to his directive to take account of speed as “one of the psychologically important features of today”. Power’s densely patterned, curving perspectives through London Tube tunnels became his visual trademark. The sinister mask-like faces of the commuters facing each other across an underground carriage in The Tube Train (c.1934) feel particularly redolent of Italian Futurism, while the rhythmic pattern-making of the composition, with the newspapers and hand receding in even perspective, brings a dose of art deco – but of a peculiarly British kind.

Power’s vision of the dehumanised rush-hour commute is even more stark in Whence & Whither? (c.1930). Its identical, black-hatted figures descend an escalator in a rigidly patterned flow and in a range of colours – orange, blue, green and black – one can easily imagine transposed to British ceramics of the time. The resulting aesthetic brings to mind both the great Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni and the iconic art deco potter Clarice Cliff.

Power had formed a fruitful collaborative relationship with the considerably younger Sybil Andrews (1898-1992), who worked as the school’s secretary. The pair had met at Heatherley art school in Fulham after serving in the First World War: he in the Royal Flying Corps, she as a welder in aeroplane construction. That experience gave Andrews first-hand experience of machine methods and aesthetics. This fed into her powerful print Speedway (1934), in which three identical motorcyclists arranged in a decisive diagonal bear down on the viewer with unnerving momentum across a piece of paper measuring only some 9 by 13 inches.

Power and Andrews shared a studio and collaborated on a series of posters for the London transport authorities, under the name Andrews-Power, in which their individual contributions are difficult to pick apart. The swerving lines in Flight’s Speed (c.1922), meanwhile, showing shoppers and buses funnelled along the vertiginous chasm of Regent Street, compound the sense of the three artists fusing their artistic personalities in a moment of intense creative excitement.

The prints of Swiss artist Lill Tschudi (1911-2004), who was only 18 when she enrolled at the school, take a subtly different approach to the complexity of urban life. The densely packed primary colours in her vibrant Rumba Band II (1936) were created, as in all Grosvenor prints, by applying each colour from a separately cut block, with overlaps between the blocks creating secondary hues and tones. The effect is to draw the eye towards the centre of the image, rather than projecting it outwards in the manner of Flight, Power and Andrews’s careering perspectives.

Women played a prominent role in the Grosvenor School, perhaps because linocut’s small scale and low cost felt more accessible than, say, monumental sculpture to artists struggling to find a place in a male-dominated art world. And they often arrived via surprising routes. The Australian artist Eveline Syme (1888-1961), who had studied in Paris during travels in Europe in the early 1920s, came across Flight’s book Lino-Cuts in a Melbourne bookshop in 1928. Entranced by reproductions of Grosvenor prints, Syme was convinced there was enough that was completely “new and different” in these images to justify setting sail for London to enrol on Flight’s course. She and her friend and fellow artist Ethel Spowers were surprised to find another Australian artist, Dorrit Black, already on the course. All three of them quickly fell under Flight’s spell. He was, Syme noted, “so full of enthusiasm for his subject, and his ideas are so clear and reasoned that it is impossible for his students not to be influenced by them.”

All these artists contributed to a series of highly successful exhibitions, first at London’s Redfern Gallery, then in the United States, China, Australia and Canada.Yet, by the mid-1930s, the Grosvenor star had already begun to wane. Flight died a forgotten figure in 1955. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in all things Modernist, but it took some time for awareness to build around the Grosvenor School’s quintessentially English Deco-Modernism. Yet Flight and friends’ vibrant linocut prints are now regarded as iconic, and are among the most accessible and readily enjoyable works of the early 20th-century British avant-garde.

Mark Hudson is the art critic of The Independent.