Sybil Andrews and the Grosvenor School Linocuts

Sybil Andrews was a printmaker first and foremost and, like her Grosvenor School colleagues, was encouraged by their mentor and teacher Claude Flight (1881-1955). They adopted a Cubist-Futurist-Vorticist pictorial language that discarded the outrageous political ideas of the Futurists and cultivated instead a personal adaptation of modernism. This catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition at Osborne Samuel Gallery in September 2015. It illustrates over 40 linocuts by Sybil Andrews and a further 30 linocuts by her friends and colleagues who worked or studied under Claude Flight during the 1920s and 30s.

The Grosvenor School of Modern Art opened in 1925 at 33 Warwick Way, just behind London's Victoria Station. The principal was the wood engraver Iain MacNab; Frank Rutter, an eminent critic and writer lectured on Modern Painters from Cezanne to Picasso; Cyril Power lectured on The Form and Structure of Buildings, Historical Ornament and Symbolism; and 24 year old Sybil Andrews was the School Secretary. Here Claude Flight taught his technique of linocut printing and gathered a coterie of students that included Power and Andrews, William Greengrass, Lill Tschudi and Edith Lawrence.