Claude Flight and His Followers
The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars
18 Apr 1992 – 12 Jul 1992
Claude Flight, Women and washing, c.1925, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1978.
About
The English artist and teacher Claude Flight was the champion of the linocut movement in Britain between the two world wars. An original and inspiring teacher, Flight attracted many promising students from England and abroad to his linocut classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London.
Although Flight only taught at the Grosvenor School for four years, from 1926 to 1930, his technical methods, as well as his style, were taken up by many of his followers during the 1930s. Among the most gifted of his students were the English artists Cyril E. Power and Sybil Andrews, while the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi was one of his most widely exhibited foreign pupils in London.
A number of Flight's students came from Australia. They included Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, all of whom soon demonstrated a mastery of the medium. The New Zealand artist Frank Weitzel also won Flight's admiration at the Grosvenor School, while Eileen Mayo, another English pupil, eventually made her home in New Zealand.
Flight and his followers ardently promoted the linocut as the modern medium for the modern age. As a twentieth-century print technique, the linocut seemed particularly appropriate to expressing the speed and dynamism of modern life. As Flight declared in his second textbook on the technique, which appeared in 1934:
The lino-cut is different to the other printing mediums, it has no tradition of technique behind it, so that the student can go forward without thinking of what Bewick or Rembrandt did before, he can make his own tradition, and coming at a time like the present when new ideas and ideals are shaping themselves out of apparent chaos, he can do his share in building up a new and more vital art of tomorrow.
The colour linocut was envisioned by Flight as the democratic art medium which would introduce modern art to the home or the flat of the ordinary person. He argued that these small and decorative prints should be affordable to the wage- earner, and, ideally, should be sold for no more than the price paid ‘by the average man for his daily beer or his cinema ticket’. Although kept low compared to those asked for oil paintings or watercolours, the prices of the linocuts of Flight and his followers usually ranged from two to three guineas.
With almost missionary zeal Flight promoted the linocut through numerous exhibitions he organised during the inter-war years. The best-known were the eight annual British Linocut Exhibitions held in London at the Redfern Gallery (1929 to 1931) and at the Ward Gallery (1933 to 1937). Under the auspices of the Redfern Gallery and its New Zealand-born director Rex Nan Kivell, major exhibitions of linocuts were also sent by Flight as far afield as the United States, China, Australia and Canada during the 1930s.
Flight's methods and ideas were also carried back to Australia by his Australian followers. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, they organised exhibitions, wrote articles and gave public demonstrations of the technique in an effort to promote the modern linocut more widely in Melbourne and Sydney.
Although the linocut movement had effectively run its course by the late 1930s, the colour linocuts produced by Claude Flight and his followers remain a striking expression of the vitality and spirit of the inter-war years.
Contrary to traditional practice in colour relief printing, Flight abandoned the use of the key-block in favour of three to four blocks of similar value. He cut one block for each colour, and built up the composition progressively by superimposing the different colours and shapes. This method lent itself to designs conceived as simplified, abstracted forms and was particularly suited to the expression of modernistic subject-matter.
In keeping with his principle that art should serve a democratic purpose, Flight advocated the use of simple materials and tools. Ordinary household linoleum was recommended for the blocks, which were cut with gouges made from the ribs of old umbrellas. No press was required as printing was always done by hand. This was achieved by using a homemade baren - a wooden disc wrapped in bamboo leaves - to rub the back of the paper which had been placed over the inked block. For hand-printing more detailed areas or stronger local colour, the back of a dessert spoon or the handle of a toothbrush was often used instead.
Linocuts were generally printed in editions of fifty. Flight would often indicate on his prints the area that was to be shown through a mount, while the title, signature and edition number were usually inscribed within the image area of the print.
Exhibition Pamphlet Essay
The Grosvenor School of Modern Art
From 1926 Flight began to teach lino-cutting one afternoon a week at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Located in an old brick building at 33 Warwick Square, not far from the Tate Gallery, the school opened in October 1925 under the direction of its progressive founder lain Macnab, a Scottish wood-engraver and teacher.
In addition to linoblock printing, students here were offered printmaking facilities in lithography and etching as well as tuition in life drawing, painting and composition. According to its prospectus, the school aimed to 'encourage students to express their own individual ideas rather than be forced to accept worn-out academic theories'.
Unlike most London art schools, the Grosvenor School did not impose entrance requirements or fixed school terms; students were free to join at any time for as long as they wished. Such flexible arrangements were particularly attractive to pupils coming from Australia or New Zealand.
The chief work of the school goes on in the big studio... Here the model poses from 10 to 1, from 2 to 4, and from 4.30 to 6.30 for quick sketching, and again from 7 to 9.30 every evening. The pose remains unchanged for a fortnight, the students moving their positions according to the work they are doing …
As a rule [the still-life room] is the most interesting of the studios, as all the work done in it is very individual, and much more varied in technique and point of view than is possible in a class working from a model.
… It is in the basement that the rooms for lithography, etching and all its kindred processes, are situated. They are fitted up with the correct presses, and other paraphernalia required, for one can learn all the intricacies of any form of art at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art.
Claude Flight possesses that readiness to enter into the student's point of view and help him develop his own individual line which is the mark of all good teachers. Sometimes in his classes it is hard to remember that he is teaching so complete is the camaraderie between him and his students. He treats them as fellow-artists rather than pupils, discusses with them and suggests to them, never dictates or enforces. At the same time he is 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.
Claude Flight and His Cave: Summer Holidays Abroad
I bought my cave just after the war for 300 francs... Its walls, ceilings and floor are all made of chalk, which is beautifully dry if you keep it aired. At the same time it is not an ideal home, for I have to keep my boots and underclothing in the bed, or they are wet through by morning.
The cave is situated in the hillside on the Seine, between Mantes-la-Jolie and Vernon. Around it, in the romantic horseshoe where it lies, are tier upon tier of holes, … which were once village dwellings. Only the flint arrow heads made by long-forgotten tenants of the Stone Age remain to tell of the original dwellers…
It is here that I cook, sail my canoe, sketch and dream.
We are going to have a class in la Roche for the first fortnight in August as before. I suppose there is no chance of your being able to join us there Lill. I know you would enjoy it, and having people about all desperately keen on sketching is an inspiration. We have some nice people coming... [including] the Dorset girl whom we emancipated you remember? …And there are others who have already booked up I expect we shall be a jolly party.
Futurism and Machine-Age Speed
In 1909, Filippo T. Marinetti, leader of the Italian Futurists, launched the Futurist art movement with a vehement declaration:
The world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
Claude Flight, who had been exposed to the Italian Futurists before the war, took up Marinetti's challenge to create a new art in keeping with the modern machine age. From the early 1920s, Flight sought to make his work expressive of speed, dynamism and energy. As he announced in an article in 1926:
The art of to-day must be in relation to the life of to-day, and, art being the most universal expression of the most universal emotion, the art of to-day must be the expression of this collective spirit in terms of simplicity, of unity, and of harmony.
Although Flight refused to call himself a Futurist, several critics at the time noted the similarity of style. P.G. Konody. the progressive English critic, was one of the first to recognise the distinctive character of Flight's talent:
Mr. Claude Flight… is one of the very few English artists to whom Italian Futurism, as expounded by Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini, has proved a fruitful source of inspiration. His work commands attention and respect, because he has not merely fastened on to an extravagant and sensational formula, but has taken from Futurism certain logical principles which he adapts in a personal manner …
While undoubtedly inspired by the Futurist aesthetic, the images of speed and dynamism made by Flight and his followers were also a response to the spirit of their age. The inter-war period was obsessed with breaking speed records for land, air and water.
The Dynamism of the Metropolis
The modernity of metropolitan life was a theme dear to the hearts of Claude Flight and Cyril E. Power. As early as 1912 the Futurist leader Marinetti had declared the way ahead. Why, London itself is a Futurist city!", he had exclaimed to the English press, pointing to London's 'brilliant hued motor buses' and the Underground's 'totally new idea of motion, of speed'. These ideas struck a sympathetic chord with the aesthetic aims of Flight and his followers after the first world war.
Flight's celebration of the dynamism of modern city life was openly announced in an article he wrote on 'Dynamism and the Colour Print' in 1925:
this speeding up of life in general... is one of the interesting and psychologically important features of to-day … Traffic problems, transport problems; everybody is on the rush either for work or pleasure … The Painter cannot but be influenced by the restlessness of his surroundings.
The importance of the landmark Arts Décoratifs exhibition of 1925 in Paris, which gave its name to the style Art Deco, was also recognised by Flight. This monumental survey of contemporary decorative arts and utilitarian objects showed the extent to which a diluted form of Cubism and Futurism had become a part of modern everyday design. The bright decorative colour, broken geometric forms and rhythmic vitality of Art Deco were very much absorbed by Flight and his followers in their modern linocuts.
The Rhythms of Nature
Although speed and the metropolis are the themes most commonly associated with the Grosvenor School artists, several of them were also interested in expressing the rhythms of rural life.
For Sybil Andrews in particular, rural work began to emerge as a major theme in her linocuts from the early 1930s. These works largely drew upon her experiences and memories of agricultural life in her native county of Suffolk in England, where she had long-established family links with the town of Bury St Edmunds. Andrews's romantic depictions of rural labour and life evoke a pre-industrial age far removed from the urban dynamism of the twentieth century.
Sport and Vitalism
Sporting subjects were a common theme in the prints of the Grosvenor School artists. The winter sports of skiing, ice hockey, sledging and ski-jumping were apt subjects for the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi. Athletics and gymnastics offered opportunities to investigate the rhythm of human movement. Dorrit Black, William E. Greengrass and Lill Tschudi all explored these themes in their work. Such subjects were endowed with a vitalism in keeping with the spirit of the time.
The suggestion of frozen movement in many of these prints recalls the high-speed freeze-frame technique of sports photography found in newspapers and pictorial magazines of the period.
Biographies
Claude Flight, British
Born 1881, London; studied at Heatherley's, London, 1912, pre-1914 exposure to the Italian Futurists; taught linocutting at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, 1926-30; principally a linocut artist, painter and teacher; London studio bombed, 1941; died 1955, Donhead St Andrew, Wiltshire.
He is a small man with very bright eyes, little bits of side-curls, and one feels instantly at one's ease with him. During the summer he lives in a cave in France, a very attractive cave, apparently, but still a cave; and in the winter he comes out of his cave to teach lino-cutting to students of the Grosvenor School, and, perhaps, elsewhere.
The subjects which I have taken are such things as buses coming down a street [cat.33], waves breaking on the shore or carrying a ship on the sea, dancing, or the movement in a crowd, swings [cat.32], or the eddies of the wind and rain: all these have their particular significant rhythm which I have been trying to grasp and place in my colour prints, textiles, sculpture and paintings so as to give the feeling of the universal rhythm in each individual movement.
Dorrit Black, Australian
Born 1891, Burnside, South Australia; a student and then instructor at the Sydney Art School, 1915-23; studied inocut with Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, September-December 1927; principally a painter and linocut artist, who also ran the Modern Art Centre, Sydney, 1932-33; returned to Adelaide. 1935, where she died 1951.
The Grosvenor School of Modern Art is supplying me with much matter for thought, and in some ways affecting my outlook on Modern Art... Claude Flight teaches the lino-cutting class... He is the authority on the subject and has been responsible for working out a good deal of the methods now in use.
[Dorrit Black] shows admirable choice of colour in a number of lino-cuts The collection should excite interest, not only because of the vigorous work it contains, but because it furnishes an example of modern experiments in new theories of art.
Cyril E. Power, British
Born 1872, London; trained and practised as an architect until 1922; founding lecturer in architectural drawing and history at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, 1925, where Claude Flight taught him linocutting: principally a linocut and monotype artist who collaborated with Sybil Andrews; died 1951. London.
Sybil Andrews and Cyril E. Power are on the whole superior to their fellows in design, colour and execution. Their sense of character, movement, and printing is developed to a remarkable degree. They are co-workers in the same studio, each inspiring the other in the conception of ideas and their pictorial realisation.
Sybil Andrews, British
Born 1898, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; joined Grosvenor School of Modern Art as secretary, where Claude Flight taught her how to make colour linocuts; shared a London studio with Power, 1930-38: principally a linocut and monotype artist; emigrated to Canada in 1947, where she settled in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
The content on this page has been sourced from: Coppel, Stephen. Claude Flight and His Followers : The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars. Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1992.
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