Sybil Andrews Linocuts

Under the inspirational teaching of Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews (1898-1992) found her artistic voice in the form of the linocut - a medium demanding directness and dynamism. Tracing her artistic journey through rural Suffolk, inter-war London and finally provincial Canada, this important publication provides a comprehensive overview of the life and work of a key figure in British art history.

'Whatever Uglow writes about she makes absolutely fascinating.' DIANA ATHILL The story of Sybil Andews and Cyril Power, two artists who changed each other in an age of experiment and turmoil. 'In all her books, she makes us feel the life behind the facts.' GUARDIAN 'Wonderfully sharp and sympathetic . . . Uglow is a perfect biographer.' CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts, streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. Cyril & Sybil traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

The bold graphic images made by artists affiliated with Vorticism, British Futurism, and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art capture the optimism and anxiety of early twentieth-century Britain. This richly illustrated volume features rare British prints from the Leslie and Johanna Garfield collection dating between 1913 and 1939—a period marked by two world wars, a global pandemic, the Great Depression, and the rise of Fascism and Communism, but also new technologies, women’s suffrage, and a growing focus on public access to art. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the catalogue are the colorful linocuts made by artists associated with London’s celebrated Grosvenor School. The visually striking compositions by Sybil Andrews, Claude Flight, Cyril E. Power, and Lill Tschudi, among others, convey the vitality of quotidian life during the machine age.

Sybil Andrews was one of Canada's most prominent artists working throughout the late twentieth century. From a cottage by the sea in Campbell River, Andrews created striking linocut prints steeped in feeling and full of movement. Inspired by the working-class community that she lived in, her art is known for its honest depiction of ordinary people at work and play on Canada's West Coast. In this first fully illustrated biography, author Janet Nicol weaves together stories from Andrews' letters, diaries and interviews from her former students and friends, creating a portrait of this determined, resilient and gifted British-Canadian artist. Andrews' work is as popular today as it was in her lifetime and continues to celebrate the cultural, industrial, agricultural and natural world of Canada's West Coast.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including letters, memoirs, photographs and critical appraisals in the press, Stephen Coppel provides a fascinating account of the work and lives of these seven artists. This book will introduce to a new audience the vitality and appeal of these prints, which, from the Second World War until quite recently, have been largely overlooked. A key feature of the book is an extensive and fully illustrated catalogue raisonne which documents over 380 linocuts, arranged in chronological order by artist. The catalogue records their exhibition history and location and provides documentary and contextual notes on individual entries.