The Grosvenor School of Modern Art

The Grosvenor School is the sort of place where you would like to walk to Warwick Square, wander in and speak to Miss Andrews in the office, to enquire whether you could look in on Mr Flight's class so you find out just what they were all up to. I suspect it was the kind of place that had as much in common with the community of artist-converts at Ditchling in Sussex as it did with the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Claude Flight (1881 - 1955) was a linocut evangelist and everyone, including the staff, attended his classes. It's no wonder they all made so many.

It was set up in this rambling old house in 1925 by three men who had all come to art and print later rather than sooner. Flight had tried out various things, including bee-keeping, untill he hit on modernism and, in particular linocut, as the answer. As you see from his Swiss Mountains from c1934, he was an enthusiast. He had begun making linocuts in 1919 and taught students to use separate blocks for each colour. In 1929 he organised 'The first exhibition of British linocuts' and even if his name is almost synonymous with linocut today, his enthusiasm for the Grosvenor School was short-lived. He taught there for only four years, from 1926 untill 1930, when he transferred his already informal classes to a cave above the river Seine.

Flight had studied at Heatherley's School of Fine Art in London both before the war and then after. Cyril Power (1872 - 1951) didn't enrol at Heatherley's untill 1925 when he was already 53. He had been a successful architect but turned his mind to art. He had met Sybil Andrews in 1921 and she duly became school secretary. (See Sybil Andrews: the rural year, February, 2011). It's not hard to see his interest in both architectural design and form in general in The Tube staircase, 1929. It shows the stairs at Russell Square underground station in London, an exact location for a dynamic print. If their modernism is at times far-fetched, this linocut does put me in mind of  Marcel Duchamp.

Power gaves classes on architecture and ornament (he had already published a three-volume book) but the only one of the trio with any prior experience of teaching at all was Iain MacNab (1890 - 1967) - and that wasn't much. If I also tell you he spent a year at Glasgow School of Art in 1917 before also moving to Heatherley's in 1918, you will begin to see the pattern. The brave idea of a school dedicated to modern art may well have begun with their joint experience of a London private art school. (I'm not suggesting the experience was bad because MacNab became joint-principal of Heatherley's in 1919 and didn't relenquish his post of director of art studies untill as late as 1953.) But in 1925, even with his limited experience, MacNab took on the job of principal at the Grosvenor and certainly stuck at it longer than Flight.

MacNab was also one of the finest British wood-engravers of C20th. The effect of prints like Corsican Landscape on his students of wood-engraving is clear; it may be less obvious with the students that practised other forms of printmaking but it there nevetheless.  As for the students themeselves, I started the post off with French Porters by the most talented one them all, the Swiss printmaker, Lill Tschudi (1911 - 2004). She came across the linocuts of that albatross-around-my-neck, Norbertine von Bresslern Roth, while still at school in Switzerland. She saw the school adverts in The Studio and attended between 1929 and 1930 when Flight was still teaching there. Like some of the other students she also trained with the French cubist Andre Lhote. It wasn't a matter of this being their only brush with modernism; some the students could obviously afford to pick and choose.

The Australian artist, Ethel Spowers (1890 - 1947) was one. She had studied art in Melbourne then moved to Europe in 1921 and, just to let you know what their first prints could be like, I include Spowers woodcut Eglise de Grace, Paris made during her first year in Europe. As you see, it isn't up to very much at all. Tug of War she produced in 1933, after her return to Australia, and is a fine piece of work without having the modernist thoroughness of Tschudi. Spowers only spent part of 1929 at the Grosvenor but it had a great effect. Linocuts she produced before that time were stronger than her early woodcut effort but conventional untill Claude Flight showed her how.

Eveline Syme had been at school with Spowers in Melbourne but went on to study classics at Cambridge. She turned her mind to painting and France in the early twenties but it was the discovery of Flight's book Lino-Cut that led Syme and her friend Ethel Spowers to enrol at Pimlico in 1929. I like the way they all went back home and turned the technique on Australia. It has of course helped to make their name. But that process only began in the 1970s, with the vogue for all things Deco. Nowadays a dealer on ebay only has to add the illustrious words 'Grosvenor School' to some linocut or other to prove that linocuts will never be affordable or democratic again. The idea had been to show the modern age they lived in - what everyone else was doing when they were making linocuts - in a modern way.

Wattle tree is by Dorrit Black (1891 - 1951). I think she is the weakest of the three Australian artists but this does show what they were about. She studied in Melbourne before heading for London in 1927 when she spent a mere three months at the Grosvenor School. It wasn't long but it was clearly enough. The British artist Gwenda Morgan (1908 - 1991) studied there far longer - between 1930 and 1936. This almost certainly couldn't have been a full-time arrangement. She had already spoent the years 1926 to 1929 across the river Thames at Goldsmith's, after all. But the example MacNab gave shines through much of her fine body of work. These wood-engravings may not be as thrilling as those linocuts but her work stays in the mind a long time after excitements have washed over it.

Ronald Grierson (1901 - 1992) was another student of MacNab's. Mainly known as a designer of textiles, he had also first studied elsewhere (at Hammersmith School of Art) before spending time at the Grosvenor. Alison MacKenzie (1907 - 1982) didn't arrive untill the 1930s (with her sister Winifred, see July, 2011). Both had studied woodcut with MacNab's sister, Chica, at Glasgow School of Art. It was a small, quite short-lived world for many of them, I imagine, far from the formal disciplines of many art schools and more in line with the progressive independent schools that were being opened up - but far more dependent than they were on the trends.

Sybil Andrews: the rural year

Sybil Andrews (1898 - 1992) was a prolific printmaker. She made 76 colour linocuts in all, more than half of them between 1929 and 1939. Almost all are exemplary. Many of them are of rural subjects but she was brought up in the town of Bury St Edmunds in the east of England. It has been said that alot of her work drew on her memories of the Suffolk countryside nevertheless (and she may well have said this herself) and what I decided to do was try and put some of the prints of the countryside into a sequence, with each activity following on from the other. Of course, one or two are landscapes. Nor was the choice I had to make always an obvious one. But then I think that in itself says something of the kind of woman Andrews was and suggests what she was trying to do. So, for instance, the print above is called 'Michaelmas' which is straightforward because it falls on 29th September. What people are doing is sometimes less easy to follow. These men appear to be forking manure onto a cart, something clearly Andrews associated with that time of year. The haycut ('Mowers') was also easy. That was June. But there are two images of ploughing - one on arable, the other on grass. The second one presumably describes the ploughing of pasture in the spring in readiness for re-sowing. Below all the patterning, she was interested in particular things - and a way of life that many of us will barely recognise. This may help to explain why it is that dealers and collectors have placed so much emphasis on her style to the detriment of her subject.

'Storm' here is obviously autumn because the tree is still green. 'Otter hunt' was less easy to pin down but I placed it in the summer because one of the Lakeland hunts took their hounds out in May (once the martens and polecats had been dealt with). What the gipsies are doing in their print (the final one) may not be perfectly clear but two of them are wearing rubber boots because they've been collecting reeds and, of all the prints, that one is the most pertinent in a way because, instead of showing the Romanies as caricatures, round their campfire, for instance, or going down the lane in a horse-drawn van, as both John Hall Thorpe and Hesketh Hubbard did, she shows them at work, playing their useful role as seasonal labourers.

Colour, of course, plays a crucial role in suggesting the time of year - and occasioanlly time of day. Most of the autumn and winter prints are dominated by reddish brown; the spring and early summer prints rely on green while high summer is blue or bluish-green. I put 'Trackway' here because I assume we are looking down through bare trees. The trees in 'Tumulus' below are pines on a burial mound, a fairly common feature of the English countryside. (These two prints in themsleves tie her very much into the recording of everyday life and the cultural aspects of town and countryside that was such a key feature of the 1930s.)

She once said of her upbringing that she had 'a paintbox from the cradle' not so much to encourage her as to keep her occupied. This is very telling. She must have been an active child and this shows in both her way of life and the subjects she chose. The term 'Futurism' and 'Vorticism' are sometimes used in connection with her prints but I am skeptical about their relevance. By the time she was making these linocuts those first exhibitions by the futurists were long gone and British Vorticism barely survied the first war. But it was only Claude Flight example as a modernist and teacher that gave her what she needed: a dynamic style that drew of early modernism and was in keeping with what she most wanted to do.

She first studied at art school locally then moved on to Chelsea in London, where she attended Heatherley's art school herself. The end of the first war saw her working as a welder in a Bristol factory, a strong indication of her practicality and unwillingness to conform to the accepted women's role. (During the second war she worked as a boatbuilder at Southampton). She also strikes me as someone who took the opportunities life offered her and when she met Cyril Power after the war they formed a working partnership that was to last for 20 years. Power went on to found the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico with Claude Flight and IainMacNab. MacNab, who was a wood-engraver, acted as principal; Flight lectured on linocut - lectures that Andrews attended when she wasn't occupied with her job of school secretary.

I think it was that kind of interaction that stimulated her and this is also why I cast doubt on the associations that are made with modernist movements like cubism and futurism. It was a style she was able to adopt to suit her own need - even if at first glance many of the artists associated with the Grosvenor School seem quite similar. Bold lines and dynamic patterns are what we look for in linocuts but if we compare her with her contemporary Norbertine Bresslern Roth, the rhythmic grouping of animals and people is about all they have in common. And although both artists have significant limitations in that all their works tend to appear similar, I think Andrews is the more vital and a far more dynamic colourist.

She also used considerable licence. I can't imagine that haymakers got together in a huddle with their whetstones unless, of course, that was how they began their working day. But it wasn't so much the hay, or the weather, or even the human figure that interested her so much as what they were doing. And this brings me to the curious thing about her. She does associate these activities with men. She is quite different from other women printmakers I've looked at. Emma Schlangenhausen had her female haymakers in the foreground; Mary Fairclough also gave women key roles in her work - her gipsy is a woman smoking a pipe. Women don't feature in her work much at all.

Not all her prints are concerned with light as this one of mowers is - and it isn't always something we look for in linocuts. But it is interesting that when she moves into the field of more conventional landscape, there is a noticeable shift. In some of these prints, especially in the one after the windmill, of a man collecting mangolds and the first print of ploughing, we can see what she has in common with the colour printers that come after her - Edward Bawden (1903 - 1983), for instance, and some of his (and her) contemporary followers like Mark Hearld (British, b 1974). The particularity becomes too intense, the simplification too childlike. It's only a slant in her but an irritation in them. (I like Hearld, Bawden less so). I think we need to be grateful that the Grosvenor School must have discouraged their students from taking the academic/medieval path as Eric Gill did before them and Bawden adopted afterwards.

This series, if that is what it is, effectively came to an end in 1939 with the outbreak of war. She had had a good run as a printmaker. Most of her British contemporaries had given up colour prints before 1930. She then turned boatbuilder and met Walter Morgan in the shipyard. They were married in 1947 and soon after that the couple emigrated to the backwoods of Canada. She was almost fifty. A second life had begun.