A bus hurtles down Regent Street in the blue haze of dusk. It seems to bend away from the eye on the fast corner towards Piccadilly Circus. The long curve of John Nash’s elegant crescent rises high above, like a cliff face, dark figures silhouetted against the glowing windows of shops far below. It could be London now – bar the kindly constable shepherding pedestrians across the road – yet this is the scene nearly 100 years ago.
Claude Flight used only blue, black and red – plus a flash of yellow for the bus hoarding that reads Speed, or would do if the last letter wasn’t rushing out of sight – to picture the exhilarating atmosphere of late-night shopping in the modern city in 1922. His linocut is superb: all graphic zip and register, curves playing against rectangles, contrasting two of the medium’s defining characteristics – incisive linearity against soft, muzzy colour. It is one of this show’s sharpest masterworks.
In the annals of printmaking, the linocut doesn’t have much status (around floor level, you might say, compared to lithograph or etching). This is partly to do with its very short history. Linoleum itself was only developed in the 1860s, and the earliest artists to come up with the idea of cutting lines into it with a gouge or blade were German expressionists around 1905 and Russian constructivists about 10 years later.
Flight made his first prints in 1919, and fervently believed in the linocut as a democratic medium for the working classes. The material was readily available and cheap as chips, if not quite as thrifty as potato-cuts. In those days you could buy lino by the bale and cut it into hundreds of printmaking tiles. The method was less complex than etching, the surface more tractable than wood or metal. Cut the lino, roll with colour and press down. Who hasn’t a folk memory, perhaps from childhood, of lifting it carefully back up to reveal the gorgeously saturated image?
Flight by name and nature: Claude was always sending aeroplanes into the air in his prints, speeding, whirling, jetting upwards in arrowhead formats that mimic, in their way, the triangular bevels of the gouge he used to cut the lino. In Swing Boats, he sends the pleasure-seekers soaring upwards in radial arcs, bright blue on grey. Even his colours soar. He was lino’s tireless pioneer in Britain, writing manuals, organising travelling exhibitions, teaching the medium at the famous Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where students could apply without any qualifications to study art for as long as they liked. Flight was mentor to most of the artists in this show.
For Cutting Edge is really a paean to the Grosvenor School, specifically Flight’s co-founder Cyril Power. Power is the genius of the London Underground, with his spectral image of the long spiral staircases winding down below the city streets, and his terrific linocut of a District Line compartment taking the bend, sharp-kneed passengers clutching their identical newspapers, strap-hangers swinging sideways.
Lifts, from 1930, gets the downward plunge through the cylindrical shaft in little more than a few variegated stripes, green and red on cream: nearly abstract. It is the same with skating, car-racing, the centrifugal force of the merry-go-round at Wembley; Power could imply all kinds of modern speed with beautifully simplified geometries. Look out especially for his commuters, descending the rolling escalators of the new underground stations like a chorus line of identical Cecil B DeMille dancers.
As with so many other gripping art shows this year, from Natalia Goncharova to Lee Krasner to Dorothea Tanning, the revelations here are almost all women. The Australian artist Ethel Spowers uses the medium to catch momentary effects – a gust of wind scattering sheets of paper, rain glittering on a pavement, the sheen on a red London postbox. The daughter of a newspaper proprietor, she made a very subtle linocut of crowds behind the front pages of a special edition, disappearing into the distance like diaphanous white sails.
Her contemporary, the Swiss-born artist Lill Tschudi, showed equal acuity. Her linocut Jeu de Boules is immediately evocative of those cliques of Frenchmen lingering beneath trees, boules cradled behind their backs as they ponder the pitch. Tschudi was fascinated by the ways of men. Workmen up ladders, waiters flapping like large crows between tables, a pair of linesmen fixing telegraph wires that bristle like cats’ whiskers around them – a print made when she was barely 21.
Above all, Sybil Andrews – her full name frequently lost in the joint pseudonym Andrews-Power, marking works made in partnership with Cyril – who goes even closer to seductive abstraction in Concert Hall (1929), her terrific image of theatre stalls far below the immense sweeping curves of the upper circles. The atmosphere of limelight and perfume is exquisitely conveyed in the soft flocking of the powdery print.
Linocut thrives to this day, in schools and art colleges, in printmakers’ workshops, in the fierce black and white of a Georg Baselitz or a huge Thomas Kilpper like the ones currently on show at Edinburgh Printmakers. Beautiful works are being made everywhere today. Primitive yet potentially magical, lino is a unique medium for everything from close drawing to the filmic overlays of colour worked up in successive stages seen in sonorous still lifes of Picasso.
But its origins in British art go right back to the Grosvenor School, and in magnificent prints like Power’s Tube Station from 1932. Worked in four different tiles, and with an almost Japanese delicacy, this scene shows the scarlet train curving round the bend of the platform towards darkness, as light electrifies the arching roof and shadows fall in the passageways: the theatre of mass transit made spectacular with humble lino.
• Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 8 September
