The colour linocuts of Berta Coucke

                                                                                    

I suspect your first reaction to Flemish artist, Berta Coucke, and her colour linocut Les deux chateaux (above) that at last here is one of those Grosvenor School artists who is talented and likeable. As usual with many of the women who studied at the Grosvenor, there is no evidence that she did apart from the obvious Grosvenor techniques she employed and that some of her work toured with the Fourth exhibition of British linocut in 1933.

Claude Flight had left the Grosvenor three years previously, but the technique of basing images on drawings, trying out various blocs of colour, using a roller and overprinting the whole paper more or less, suggests she did train with him. The style of the prints also suggests she knew the work of Lill Tschudi.

The skinny, would-be modern figures (above) are typical of the style Flight himself was using in the late twenties. More intriguing is the manner of Les deux chateaux. This is also comparable to Flight's work of about 1932 and 1933 when he returned to more conventional landscape after he visited Tschudi in Switzerland. But as always with Grosvenor, the individuality of the artist is obscured by the prescriptive approach of the teacher. But then, they were all there for too short a time to develop and the class was held only once a week.

I know nothing more about her but I can tell you the preparatory drawing at the bottom turned up on ebay so it is worth bearing in mind that pages from her sketch-book are about. The fortune-teller (above) has the chic of French graphic art of the 1920s. But there is also a hint of the teacher-student relationship. By all accounts, Flight was an enthusiastic and engaging teacher who treated everyone like artists, but it was nevertheless impossible for them to avoid the forcefulness of his approach.

These are quite canny prints and it is a shame there are not more of them about. The final image of the dancers (above) suggests an artist who was half-way to genuine abstraction and who gift for design and colour. My guess from all this is that Couke's real interest was in fashion. Before the war, the students on the fashion course at the Wiener Werkstaette had been asked to use colour linocuts in their portfiolios and the dancers above gives you an idea why.

Thanks are due to Paramour Fine Art for Les deux chateaux and to Larkhall Fine Art for The fortune-teller. It is £600. The dancers are in the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco