Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking review — An exquisite balance of boldness and graphic harmony
Although billed as a show of modernist printmaking, Cutting Edge is more specific.
Beyond an introductory space in which key British modern artists including Paul Nash and David Bomberg appear, it’s principally dedicated to a group of artists gathered around the Grosvenor School of Art, an inter-war institution in Pimlico. Even more specifically, it explores an outmoded medium: linocutting.
Claude Flight was the leader of the group, who taught linocutting at the school. Lino was for flooring and Flight felt that linocuts, made from gauging out forms from the surface, should be “an art of the people for their homes”.
Flight and his students threw themselves into depicting the speed and dynamism of the everyday post-First World War world, using a language that was clearly inspired by cubism, futurism and British vorticism — energetic movement captured in hard-edged reductive form. We see how the group tackled images of work, sport and pastimes and of urban life, particularly the buses and the Tube.
Tube posters made by Andrew-Power — the Grosvenor duo Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power — are the great culmination of the group’s activities.
Lill Tschudi coaxed the most from the medium, finding an exquisite balance of boldness and graphic harmony. Her work is a revelation, as is much of this show.
Until September 8 (020 8693 5254, dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk)
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