Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939

Speed captures the bustling energy and movement of both buses and pedestrians on Regent Street, a busy commercial hub in London’s West End. One double-decker bus has the lettering "SPEE" on its side, which, combined with the curving forms of the buildings and roads, conveys the sensation of speed. This depiction of contemporary urban activity evokes comments by the Italian Futurists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ("London itself is a Futurist City! Look at those brilliant-hued motor-’buses, these enormous, glaring posters") and Gino Severini ("London is a city where movement and order reign. . . . Motor-omnibuses passing and re-passing rapidly in the crowded streets covered with letters—red, green, white—are far more beautiful than the canvases of Leonardo or Titian, and closer, too, to Nature"), artists whose work Flight knew and whom he may have met.

Wadsworth was greatly inspired by the industrial landscape found in West Yorkshire, an area he knew from his childhood. Works such as Yorkshire Village use an abstract, reductive vocabulary based on faceted geometric forms that recalls early Cubist landscapes by Picasso and Braque. Wadsworth simplified the composition considerably, capturing spare architectural details such as chimneys and roofs of factories and buildings in the valley below, made more dramatic by his elevated viewpoint. Yorkshire Village is one of Wadsworth’s first color woodcuts. The combination of different colors allowed him to explore a range of possibilities while maintaining the stark, impersonal quality he sought with woodcut. The inscription "Heptonstall" refers to the West Yorkshire town; Wadsworth frequently wrote below his images the names of places where, and even the dates of when, he made designs for woodcuts.

Andrews here created a vibrant image of two workers at a winch, capturing a dynamic sense of rhythm between the figures and the larger composition. The tension and force of the men’s work appears to become visible and radiate outward, filling the surrounding space. The malleability of their bodies is pronounced as they bend, extend, and contort their forms over the tool. The winch’s crank echoes the shape of one worker’s arm, visually blending in to become part of his body. By contrast, Andrews rendered the toothed surface of the drum with greater precision, emphasizing the sharp grooves of its pronounced spokes. She expanded this concept with The New Cable, which shows a larger group of men working with a giant winch.

While the Italian Futurists glorified warfare, Nevinson, the only British Futurist, did not, especially after his time on the front. In his autobiography, he wrote that he made war images "without pageantry, without glory, and without the over-coloured heroic that had made up the tradition of all war paintings up to this time. . . . No man saw pageantry in the trenches." In Troops Resting, French soldiers wear the distinctive steel Adrian helmets of 1915, whose circular form is repeated in their kits, supplies, and food. The work makes visible the mental and physical exhaustion of the French army, which had suffered enormous losses by 1916.

The foremost interwar poster artist in Britain, Kauffer achieved great attention for his bold modernist posters commissioned by London public transportation executive and contemporary art patron Frank Pick to advertise the London Underground and related services. Here, Kauffer captured the machine forms and sense of velocity and dynamism associated with the Underground, or Tube. Using an airbrush to make the numbers appear to project toward the viewer, he combined imagery and text to promote the Tube as a means for recreation in the evening ("the bright hours"). A related poster, Shop Between 10 and 4 – The Quiet Hours (1930), uses a similar design and palette to advertise the usefulness of the city’s public transportation system for leisure activities outside of peak commuting hours.

Grosvenor School artists frequently presented images of sports from the vantage point of spectators rather than athletes, something Andrews adopted in Speedway. Here, she captured the velocity of racing motorbikes—a sensation amplified by their arrangement into a bold diagonal—as well as the excitement felt by the audience. Speedway also recalls photographs found in newspapers, magazines, and newsreels, thus testifying to the rise of new types of reporting. The work corresponds to an unpublished poster made for London Transport, which, under the leadership of Frank Pick, commissioned numerous artists and designers to make posters promoting public transportation. Andrews collaborated with Cyril Power as "Andrew Power" and produced several posters for London Transport, including To Hire a Bus or Coach and Lord’s, Oval.

Concert Hall, Andrews’s first editioned linocut, was based on sketches made of London’s Queen’s Hall, a premier venue for classical music due to its excellent acoustics. Andrews used a cool palette to depict the dramatic curves and nearly abstract shadows of the balconies. The tightly packed rows of people point to the venue’s notoriously cramped conditions. While the image and title might evoke exclusivity more than many of Andrews’s other works, the Queen’s Hall was known for hosting the Proms, a concert season with lower-priced tickets and a more relaxed experience that sought to make "high art" more accessible. Concert Hall also shows Andrews’s early interest in depicting architectural spaces, something she shared with her partner, Cyril Power. The Queen’s Hall was destroyed in the Blitz in 1941.

Kauffer was admired for creating works for a large public audience that were structured by an avant-garde visual language. The popularity of his posters among a diverse audience, which included artists and cultural producers as well as everyday commuters, inspired the art critic and Grosvenor School professor Frank Rutter to note that Kauffer "accomplished the miracle of introducing Cubism into the railway-stations and hoarding[s] of England." In this vibrant poster, Kauffer depicted the transition from winter to summer through layered planes of color, hard-edged forms, and stark contrasts between the dark tones of winter and the brighter colors of summer. Exemplifying this seasonal shift is a figure who appears first on the left, shrouded in a heavy black coat and hat, and then again in the center, outfitted in white sports clothes and tennis racquet.

Rush Hour was made a year after Andrews' Straphangers and can be read as a reverse of the earlier work. Here, Andrews flipped the crescent shape from the bottom of the sheet to the sides and multiplied it to create a platform for the figures. She utilized vivid orange and blue tones for both the escalator stairs and the commuters bodies, thus unifying them against the white tone of the sheet. Rather than showing the commuters’ heads and upper bodies, she depicted three sets of legs belonging to anonymous passengers of both genders as they gingerly navigate the spiky orange and blue shapes representing wooden escalator steps. The pointed edges of the steps appear to have been derived from Cyril Power’s escalators, again testifying to the artists’ close working relationship and mutual influence.

Andrews often focused on the natural elements, particularly in pastoral settings. The Windmill conveys nature’s magnificent power and its potential for both production and destruction, a duality also seen in Nevinson’s The Blue Wave. Harnessing nature and revealing its extraordinary force, a large windmill dominates the composition; the spiky forms of its blades are echoed in the knife-like shadows on the ground and seem to refract into the splintered blue-and-white sky. Its image is echoed in the smaller form behind it, which resembles a pinwheel or flower. The windmill was one Andrews knew well as it was located in the Suffolk town of Woolpit, near her hometown of Bury St Edmunds. The same windmill also features in an early work by Cyril Power, Elmers Mill, Woolpit (ca. 1925), believed to be his first linocut.

In this linocut, a small group of men strain to maneuver a giant cable and the massive drum around which it is coiled. The jagged rows of teeth indicating layers of cable recall mechanized elements seen in earlier depictions of industrialization, yet Andrews’s image signifies more than technological and industrial power. The men’s contorted bodies laud the human toil, raw physicality, and teamwork that underpinned manufacturing as well as telegraphy, telephony, and other systems that marked the new age. With their angular forms, blank faces, and green-and-brown uniforms, these anonymous figures resemble interchangeable machine products. Made during a global depression when British unemployment soared, The New Cable depicts the connectivity, labor, and frequently overlooked, unglamorous actions that were essential to modern life.

Andrews made numerous prints inspired by her hometown of Bury St Edmunds and the agricultural activities around which the local economy was based. Tillers of the Soil is dominated by a team of Shire horses. Designated as laborers, these massive animals engage in grueling physical work in tandem with the farmer. Their sturdy, thick bodies connect them to the land, while their legs, raised in unison, and the prominent yokes around their necks indicate the rigor of the chores they perform. They exist in stark contrast to the pedigreed horses used in leisure activities, such as steeplechases and horseback riding, enjoyed by the middle class and wealthy. The elongated forms of these elegant animals are often shown effortlessly leaping in works such as Andrews’s In Full Cry.

Andrews, like many Grosvenor School artists, set works in the Underground. She used some of the same colors as Cyril Power and depicted similar scenes of commuters and architectural details, but her works are more cheerful and express less ambivalence about the Underground and modernity broadly considered. Her compositions are minimal and sleek as she eliminated extraneous details that would detract from the pulsating rhythm of movement in the machine age. Her figures are also more anonymous, represented without facial features or, as in the case of Rush Hour, from the knee down. In Straphangers, a work an anonymous critic described as capturing "the very soul of modern London," sharp curves represent the torsos and arms of passengers packed onto a subway car as they hold straps for stability.

Andrews’s sports scenes also evoke labor, standardization, and ideas of factory production promoted in scientific management theories, such as Taylorization and Fordism, which were designed to enhance workers’ productivity and efficiency. Numerous similarities exist, for instance, between her images of men working (Haulers and Oranges) and her depiction of athletes in Bringing in the Boat, in which the single line of laborers from the former works is echoed and expanded into two receding lines of rowers, whose sharp angles and jagged lines are mirrored by the boat’s metal spokes. One can also compare Andrews’s Bringing in the Boat and its industrialized aesthetic with Cyril Power’s The Eight, which combines elements of mechanization with colors and shapes that evoke the natural world.

The Gale is likely set in a town or urban site where nature’s strength and dynamism—portrayed here in the form of blustery winds and rain—is shown as something dramatic but also rather quotidian. The power of the natural elements is indicated through the swirling blue forms and dotted lines, as well as through the figures’ stances as they brace against the force of the winds. Anchored by heavy black footwear, the figures are nearly hidden by their umbrellas, which echo the forms of their own curved postures and the wind’s energy while also recalling the crescent-shaped curves Andrews used in Straphangers and Rush Hour, made during this same period. Despite the dramatic weather, the people appear to be more inconvenienced than endangered or awestruck.

While Andrews made many images of the city, she, like other Grosvenor School artists, also created numerous prints of athletic events and other physically challenging endeavors in rural environments, with a particular focus on equestrian activities such as steeplechases and hunts. Andrews reinvented this traditional genre by applying a machinelike aesthetic to it (perhaps inspired by her work as a welder in an airplane factory during World War I), thus enabling her to convey the same sense of motion and power found in her other works. The velocity and potential for danger that she captures with motorbikes in Speedway (1934), for instance, are also present here, in a work depicting riders mounted on horses in mid-jump, following hunting dogs likely in pursuit of a fox. This linocut, titled In Full Cry, is part of a group that was recently acquired from Leslie and Johanna Garfield.

Manual labor was a dominant theme in Andrews’s oeuvre. Oranges, which shows a line of men moving boxes of imported produce, is her first linocut to feature this subject. The men advance in a circular direction toward the open truck, their movements echoed by the shadows their bodies cast. As oranges were not grown commercially in Britain, their presence and that of the crates signal the rise of imported goods (in contrast to a reliance on domestic produce) and the global reach of the British Empire. Andrews praised hard work, both in the workforce and in art production. In addition to taking care of her younger siblings after her father moved to Canada, she was a welder during World War I, a schoolteacher, and then a secretary (at the Grosvenor School).

Andrews worked as a welder constructing airplanes during World War I. Sledgehammers was based on a memory from this time of seeing blacksmiths at the forge. In this vividly colored linocut, she extended and contoured the men’s bodies to convey a feeling of monumentality and eliminated the anvil, metal, and anything that might detract from the image of pure physical force. Arms and hammers appear as a single instrument of power, and the sensation of repeated blows and coiled energy radiates across the surface. The circular formation and rendering of force and motion reveal the ongoing influence of Futurism. By the time Sledgehammers was made, machines had largely replaced many traditional tools and practices, such as those depicted here, yet Andrews presents her laborers as representative of modernity.

Fall of the Leaf is an idealized scene of harmony between man and nature. While it initially appears to be pure landscape, on closer inspection one sees, underneath the fanned-out trees, a man at a plough led by three horses whose forms mirror the patterning of the fields. The linocut is dominated by decorative and textural elements and composed of multiple tones, with overlapping curving shapes. Although such landscapes had a timeless quality and offered a sense of security, British farming was in decline. As the British historian Eric J. Hobsbawm and others have noted, by the 1930s British agriculture was no longer central to the economy and "had become a very minor factor indeed." In fact, there was such a crisis that the government had to intervene to save the British agricultural industry.

Here, in one of her most abstract works, Andrews depicted a group of city dwellers in London’s famous Hyde Park. Their bodies are distended and reduced to dark hats and coats out of which the occasional bit of skin emerges, such as their featureless faces. Despite the large size of the park, the thin vertical sheet and compression of figures create the impression of a crowded space, such as a Tube station. The cool tones and lush greenery they connote, however, undermine the stress of the density and congestion. The figures appear at peace in their surroundings, likely a statement about the restorative power of nature, especially necessary in urban spaces. Such links are further reinforced by the repetition of forms and colors, making the figures appear integrated into their surroundings.

While modern machines like race cars and motorbikes grabbed the public’s attention during the interwar period, there was still great interest in horseracing. Here, Andrews captured the sensation of speed and the dynamic and rhythmic movements of the horses as they round the track. The overlapping and repeated forms convey the impression of motion and time unfolding, recalling the work of Eadweard Muybridge (best known for his nineteenth-century time-lapse photographs of galloping horses) as well as contemporary films showing the movement of animals and people in a way that was previously unthinkable. The race depicted is likely the celebrated Epsom Derby, an association strengthened by the print’s connection with Epsom Summer Morning, the 1933 poster Andrews made as "Andrew Power" for London Transport.

In the early 1930s, Frank Pick commissioned Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power to create posters promoting excursions using public transportation. The artists credited eight posters as "Andrew Power," in reference to their respective surnames. According to Andrews, however, the labor was divided: Power secured the commission, and she designed the posters. Many posters celebrated sporting events, from ice skating and soccer to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and horse racing. Lord’s, Oval captures the spirit of cricket in its design while also providing information about both upcoming matches and relevant bus and tram routes. By contrast, To Hire a Bus or Coach focuses exclusively on the buses themselves, with red representing the city buses and green, the country coaches.

In the early 1930s, Frank Pick commissioned Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power to create posters promoting excursions using public transportation. The artists credited eight posters as "Andrew Power," in reference to their respective surnames. However, according to Andrews, the labor was divided: Power secured the commission, and she designed the posters. To Hire a Bus or Coach features both the red buses of the city and the green coaches that made trips to the country. Many of their posters also celebrated sporting events, from ice skating and soccer to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and horse racing. Lord’s, Oval captures the spirit of cricket in its design while providing information about both upcoming matches and relevant bus and tram routes.

This artist’s book, published in 1919 by London’s politically and artistically radical bookshop Henderson’s (known as "the Bomb Shop"), was based on sketches Bomberg made in 1914. Like similar works by the Vorticists, a group Bomberg was affiliated with yet never formally a member of, these images, as well as other pieces made during this period, have an architectonic structure and aesthetic recalling both Cubism and Futurism, though they adhered to neither. Initially, the drawings were not linked to Russian ballet. Years later, however, in 1919, Bomberg connected the drawings with a London production he attended of La Boutique fantasque, with sets by André Derain, likely embellishing his compositions and making the palette more intense to reflect the influence of the Ballets Russes performance.

Three Speeds is closely related to Flight's linocut Speed, which was made the same year; in both works, Flight portrayed a quotidian experience of urban living—that of commuting—and endowed it with modernist qualities. Here, the celebrated double-decker bus is more streamlined than in Speed, reduced to alternating stripes of red and white, with signage and other distractions eliminated. Its sleekness and size convey a sense of motion (or its potential) and efficiency in moving large groups of people, even though only the driver is shown and the bus appears to be stopped. Gathered on the street are small groups of people, presumably awaiting transportation. As the lines they fall into recede into the distance, their forms become increasingly reductive, creating a sense of anonymity and interchangeability.

Swing-Boats captures the velocity and dynamism that Flight and the Grosvenor School artists found in Futurism and sought to portray in their depictions of interwar modern life. Here, Flight captures the joy and exuberance of flying in a funfair ride using rhythmic curves, dynamic lines, and repeated geometric forms and patterns. A large swath of visible paper and the jagged reddish-brown of the vessel indicate its extraordinary speed, suggesting an ability to launch into the sky and defy earthly restrictions. Concentric lines reinforce the impression of movement. In the upper corner, riders are reduced to circular forms representing abstracted heads, torsos, arms, and other body parts. Their boat continues beyond the edge of the composition, a testament to the powerful momentum of the ride.

Here, Flight created an image of sound made visible, expressed by curved lines radiating from the singers’ mouths. Their powerful voices rather than any physical movement of their bodies are what bend the surrounding structures into the fragmented, billowing forms that fill the composition. Edward Wadsworth’s earlier Vorticist image of a similar subject (Street Singers, 1914, MMA 2019.592.27) seems static by comparison, the three machine-like figures—rendered in tones of black and gray—appearing still, self-contained, somber, and almost sculptural. Flight, by contrast, created a prismatic effect by layering colors from four blocks (yellow, blue, red, and black) into vibrant decorative patterns, perhaps in reference to the joyful serenade of his singers.

Flight spent a great deal of time in France—he made art and taught classes at his cave outside of Paris every year—and was very knowledgeable about avant-garde movements. In this image, he depicted the rear of a Parisian bus as it drives out of the frame. On the other side of the composition, two figures, likely recently disembarked passengers, walk behind the bus in the opposite direction. The geometric reduction and fragmentation of forms, as well as the repetition of colors, speak to the influence of Analytic Cubism, while the emphasis on speed and the dynamic lines show the impact of Futurism. Flight praised the linocut as allowing artists to carve curved, fluid lines more easily and apply flat planes of color without unintended textural effects.

In this linocut, Flight depicted a moment from the six-hour endurance race at the celebrated Brooklands track, whose events were widely covered in the press. The rhythmic movement of the three race cars, which at first appear to be a single car moving through space, reflects what Italian Futurists termed "the beauty of speed." Flame-like strips of color and the curving forms of the track and surrounding space amplify the feeling of velocity and mechanical force while also conveying the exhilaration of the spectators, an appropriate sensation as the track was specifically built to accommodate an audience. Opened in 1907, Brooklands was closely associated with British car racing, especially as numerous records for both speed and distance were set there.

Fookes’s Poplar Trees and Telegraph Poles features a row of wooden utility poles that mirror in form and orientation a line of poplar trees across the road, creating a new kind of allée that reflected the alteration of the natural landscape by contemporary technologies. Stringing the poles together are two parallel rows of wires that extend beyond the horizon and edge of the paper. Like her print Mining Town, No. 2 (MMA 2019.592.118), this work illustrates the impact of those technologies that accompanied recently developed environments. Numerous artists and writers noted the ubiquity of new modes of communication, such as those signaled here, with telephones, telegraphs, and the infrastructure that supported them appearing in a wide variety of works.

Here, Fookes depicts the spread of industry into the countryside and the towns built in response. The seemingly endless rows of modern, uniform houses represent the impact of the dramatic rise in homebuilding in the interwar period, especially the construction of public housing. The railway tracks that bisect the image signal the expanded train service for both commuters and those traveling longer distances, thus altering the landscape and allowing people to move beyond the city. Fookes’s color linocut Poplar Trees and Telegraph Poles shows the impact of related technologies, such as the telephone and telegraph,that accompanied these new developed environments.

Made shortly after Nevinson was named an official British war artist in 1917, Swooping Down on a Taube belongs to the series The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals, a government-sponsored, multi-artist propaganda series intended to be displayed around the country and sold to raise funds for the war effort. As part of his research, Nevinson flew over the English countryside—his first time in an airplane. The experience led him to later recall "the whole newness of vision and the excitement" it conjured, which had a profound impact on his work. Here, in a more somber image, he depicted a British plane attacking a German Taube, which, faintly visible at the bottom of the composition, is portrayed so as to resemble a bird.

Unable to enlist in the British army for health reasons, Nevinson volunteered in fall 1914 for a Red Cross ambulance unit serving northern France and Belgium. Here, he conveyed the dynamism of a seemingly impenetrable line of French soldiers, or poilus, whom he would have certainly encountered. Dressed in their distinctive uniforms, they advance with purpose and determination, an effect amplified by the faceted forms that capture a sense of endless, repetitive movement and reflect Nevinson’s earlier association with Futurism. Individual features are minimized and further obscured by capes, hats, raised bayonets, and bladelike shields, while the broad, sweeping strokes that depict the men’s lower bodies unify the group. Nevinson made a painting, drawings, and a woodcut of this image; the woodcut appeared in the second issue of BLAST, the "War Number."

The Blue Wave, Nevinson’s first color lithograph, reflects the influence of Japanese color woodblock prints, in particular, Katsushika Hokusai’s 1830–32 Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Nevinson, like Hokusai, created an image in which nature is shown as sublime—that is, awe-inspiring in both its beauty and potential for danger. While Hokusai took a broader view and included additional elements, such as Mount Fuji and three small boats with rowers, Nevinson omitted representations of people and anything man-made. Instead, in this tightly cropped composition, he presented a nearly abstract image comprising dramatic rolling waves topped with crests of foam. The Blue Wave, made when Nevinson was focusing almost exclusively on war images, likely also refers to the trauma of warfare and contemporary turmoil.

That Cursèd Wood portrays the horrific destruction of nature, and, by extension, of humanity, on the Western Front. Bleak and war-torn, this no-man’s-land is scarred by shells and punctuated by seared and mangled trees resembling grave markers. Above the pockmarked surface fly several airplanes that resemble giant insects or birds. The title derives from the 1916 poem "At Carnoy" by British writer and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, which tells of a brigade "crouched among thistle-tufts" as twilight fades. Despite the surroundings, the exhausted soldiers attempt to rest in preparation for the next day: "To-morrow we must go / To take some cursèd Wood . . . O world God made!"

A Dawn, 1914 depicts a mass of French soldiers moving swiftly through winding city streets. The zigzag line of repeated forms and figures is seemingly endless, an impression emphasized by the dramatic receding perspective and elevated vantage point. Most of Nevinson’s images of soldiers show them on a battlefield or lined up on a desolate road. Here, despite the power of their raised bayonets, which seem to puncture the air, the troops are evidently fatigued, and their position reveals them to be exposed and vulnerable to attack. The war imagery, repetitive geometric shapes, and sense of force and speed demonstrate Nevinson’s interest in Futurism; he diverged from the movement, however, in refusing to extol warfare.

Column on the March is related to Nevinson’s Returning to the Trenches; however, rather than individuals, it shows a long line of French soldiers marching to the front. Nevinson indicated the almost unfathomable length of formations like this—which could exceed twenty miles—by allowing the infantry line to extend beyond the limits of the composition. The monotony of the mass and the rigor of each soldier give the impression that the assembled men are like a human "tank" charging toward its destination. While Nevinson made a similar painting, many critics found the sharper drypoint to be a more effective condemnation of war. This work may be a response to Gino Severini’s Futurist images of war trains cutting through the landscape, such as Train in the City (1915), a work Nevinson knew.

Nevinson made Southampton after illnesses led to him being released from the military with an honorable discharge. While the majority of Nevinson’s war-related works depict scenes set in northern France and Belgium, Southampton illustrates the massive scale of war mobilization. Dock workers are shown as part of a system comprising cranes, ships, materials, and machinery to support both troops overseas and domestic production. The men load large planks of wood, which would be used for trenches and dugouts at the front as well as in British industries such as coal. Their poses mirror each other and reflect the diagonals found throughout the composition, for instance in the stacks of wood and the cranes overhead and in the line of boats receding into the distance.

In "Whence & Whither?," Power portrays a seemingly endless line of faceless commuters as they descend underground on an escalator to catch the London subway, or Tube, at rush hour. He layered flat planes of bold, often contrasting colors, and used curvilinear and concentric lines, jutting　diagonals, and sharp edges to represent positive aspects of modernity (such as speed and efficiency, the intermingling of classes and genders in urban centers) as　well the negative (such as feelings of alienation and reification). Power made numerous sketches of passengers, one of which includes the caption "THE ROBOTTOMLESS PIT, HOMO MECHANIENS." He carved the design for Whence & Whither? into four linoleum blocks, each corresponding to specific colors and compositional elements. To expand his palette, he layered impressions from different blocks and altered the amount of pressure applied.

The Merry-Go-Round, which was inspired by a visit to the Wembley Exhibition Fun Fair in London, conveys the dynamism of contemporary life. In order to depict symbols of modernity—such as race cars, subways, sporting events, amusement parks, and machinery—Power and other students at London’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art embraced the linoleum cut, a relief-printmaking technique related to the woodcut. Linoleum, an inexpensive, synthetic material, was easier to carve than wood and allowed artists to realize a greater variety of effects, such as flat planes of color, diverse textures, and long, sinuous lines. The strength of the material enabled artists to pull a greater number of prints without compromising quality; the resultant prints were then sold at lower prices, thus reflecting the group’s democratic aspirations.

Leslie and Johanna Garfield have created an internationally renowned collection of modern and contemporary prints; among their deep and diverse holdings is an unparalleled collection of British modernist works on paper. Within this latter area, a particular focus has been on linocuts made by Grosvenor School artists during the interwar years. These vibrant works convey the dynamism of contemporary urban life through both subject matter and techniques developed using unconventional materials and processes, which allowed the artists to express the aesthetic of movement inherent in their subjects. One such work is Power’s The Eight, which depicts an overhead view of rowers racing along the Thames in preparation for the annual Head of the River Race—an image the artist saw from Hammersmith Bridge, located near his London studio. The Eight reflects the Grosvenor School artists' interest in depicting physical prowess and groups of people. To realize their vision, the artists embraced the linoleum cut, a relief-printmaking technique related to the woodcut. An inexpensive, synthetic material created in the mid- nineteenth century, linoleum not only connoted modernity but was easier to carve than wood and allowed artists to realize a greater variety of effects, such as flat planes of color, numerous textures, and long, sinuous lines. In The Eight, Power layered flat planes of colors and used both curvilinear and concentric lines, jutting diagonals, and sharp edges to represent positive aspects of modernity such as speed and efficiency; at the same time, the palette and composition evoke elements—such as plant forms—from the organic world.

Inspired by the modernity of London’s subway system, popularly known as the Tube, Power featured it in many of his signature linocuts. The disengaged passengers on this crowded subway—a scene familiar to many urban dwellers—prefer to read their newspapers rather than interact with one another. Alienation, a by-product of modern life, is a theme often present in Power’s images of the London Underground. Together with Sybil Andrews, he designed posters for the London Passengers Transport Board from 1929 to 1937, promoting the use of the system under the pseudonym "Andrew-Power."

Tschudi studied at the Grosvenor School as well as in Paris with artists such as Fernand Léger and the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, both of whom influenced her desire to use repetitive geometric forms and portray movement in her art. The Tour de Suisse, a bicycle race begun in 1933, required cyclists to travel the narrow and vertiginous Klausen Pass, located in the mountains near where Tschudi lived. By compressing the riders and emphasizing the undulating Alpine path they navigate, she depicted the physical endurance and strength necessary for this endeavor rather than speed. A decorative border mirrors the interior patterns; it likely refers to the artist’s plan to print the image on fabric and marks the print as a rare example from the edition.

In 1935, Tschudi traveled to London for an exhibition of her work. There, she encountered celebrations commemorating the Silver Jubilee of King George V; this festive street scene is derived from her memories of those events. The work is dominated by flags—in particular, the Union Jack—banners, and other decorations, which seem to extend beyond the image’s surface to lead the viewer into the scene. Tschudi also cropped the image, altered scale and perspective, and compressed space to create a sense of disorientation. Yet despite the visual activity, she utilized only two linoleum blocks—one in red and one in blue—which she layered to create the various tones and effects. Street Decoration is among a group of Grosvenor School linocuts recently acquired from Leslie and Johanna Garfield.

Unlike Wadsworth’s depictions of dazzle ships, in which he stressed the bold optical patterns of their contrasting black-and-white designs, Tugs consists of solid black forms interrupted by jagged white zigzags. Shapes are compressed and tightly cropped, producing a sense of disorientation. This compression, when combined with the sawtooth patterns found throughout the composition and the vertical stacks, among other related elements, recalls Wadsworth’s earlier work Newcastle and his evocation of mechanical parts made large to show the superhuman power of industrial machinery. Here, he applied the same precision and sense of force to wartime vessels.

Minesweepers were ships that helped locate and detonate sea mines in order to safeguard shipping lanes and ensure that the Germans did not create a naval blockade. In this small print, Wadsworth compressed the space between the ship, the bridge, and other elements in the composition, thus blurring distinctions between object and field to create a sense of visual confusion tantamount to encountering a dazzle ship at sea.

Landscape is another woodcut of industrial terrain, yet instead of jutting verticals indicating chimneys and factories, the work has a more horizontal orientation and organic quality. Bold undulating lines of color and patterns recall the work of the Russian German artist Vasily Kandinsky, which Wadsworth knew well from his time in Munich. In the first issue of BLAST, Wadsworth translated an excerpt from Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art in which he praised the power of "a square, a circle, a triangle, a rhombus, a trapezium, and other innumerable forms. . . . All these forms are citizens of the abstract empire with equal rights." Wadsworth produced Landscape and other woodcuts in multiple color variants (different combinations of colored inks applied to the same carved woodblocks) and also used an array of papers to produce assorted visual effects.

In a posthumous tribute to Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis, the artist, writer, and a founder of Vorticism, described an interwar visit the two took to Yorkshire. Lewis wrote that, from their vantage point at the top of a hill, Wadsworth pointed to the town of Halifax below: "We gazed down into its blackened labyrinth. I could see he was proud of it. ‘It’s like Hell, isn’t it?’ he said enthusiastically." Bradford, depicted here, is about five miles from Cleckheaton, where Wadsworth grew up and where his family’s mill was located. The sharpness of the image reflects the precision his learned from his studies of machine draftsmanship in Munich. As in other works, Wadsworth adopted an elevated, almost aerial view, which, combined with the reductive angular forms and the rigor of the design, creates a nearly abstract image.

In 1919, Wadsworth returned to the Black Country to observe its furnaces and the terrains created by their industrial waste in greater detail. The following year, he exhibited thirty-seven Black Country drawings in London. Reviewers praised his ability to capture the scenes in all their brutality. A critic in The Times noted: "What he gives us is the terrific energy of the whole industrial process represented, as only energy can be represented, in rhythmical and orderly forms." In this woodcut, Wadsworth captured the power and environmental destruction of blast furnaces, designed to heat and melt iron to remove unwanted materials. Dominating the image are the clouds of waste expelled by the furnaces. Wadsworth rendered the smoke and gaseous forms with gracefully undulating lines, giving them a solidity equal to that of the structures.

Like many of his contemporaries, Wadsworth adopted a different artistic style during the interwar period. Whereas Yorkshire Village, with its fragmented and faceted forms, embodies his Vorticist style, Yorkshire shows a more representational aesthetic and approach. In addition to the Black Country, Wadsworth depicted northern British towns, such as Yorkshire, where he had a personal connection. In this print, industry is still present—chimney stacks and smoke remain visible—yet it appears to be less disruptive than in the Black Country pieces, with industrial elements even assimilated into the town. Houses, reduced to geometric shapes, are tightly compressed into interlocking angled rows. Yorkshire can also be read as an elegiac commentary on Britain after the war, an impression reinforced by the shrouded figures on the steps.

In this color woodcut, Wadsworth created a complex construction comprising layers of simplified geometric shapes. Using just three colors (gray, blue, and black) as well as the gray color of the paper, he depicted a townscape, most likely of Bradford, in the north. View of a Town is less abstract than his prior work, such as Bradford: View of a Town, in which he engaged a similar subject. Rather than using multiple interlocking lines of various sizes recalling earlier Analytic Cubist depictions of landscapes and similar motifs, in View of a Town, Wadsworth employed a vocabulary of sharp angles and larger flat planes of color. Though the work is still abstract, representational elements—such as chimneys and roofs—are visible to a greater degree than previously.

In this nearly abstract image of the Black Country, Wadsworth depicted a dramatic and brutal man-made landscape composed of industrial waste from the region’s factories and coal mines. Slag heaps and other refuse from coal and steel production are rendered as mountainous forms, while furnaces fill the sky with flames and smoke that, along with soot and other pollution, turn the sky dark. Jagged strips cut through the image, indicating areas designed for the passage of materials and people. The title likely refers to developments in road surfacing that involved tarmac, the recently patented material developed by Edgar Purnell Hooley. Wadsworth skillfully utilized the directness of the woodblock to create a nearly expressionist work that can be read as a commentary on the devastation brought by the war.

After training at a gun station in Britain, Wadsworth sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean and was based on the Greek island of Lemnos, where he analyzed aerial reconnaissance photographs. He also created drawings that he would develop into woodcuts upon returning home in late 1917. Riponelli: A Village in Lemnos recalls Wadsworth’s earlier woodcuts (especially Yorkshire Village), yet unlike these Vorticist pieces, it was not inspired by industrial landscapes but rather the Mediterranean environment and its "warships and volcanos," as Wadsworth noted in a letter to Wyndham Lewis. Here, he depicted stone houses stacked on a hilly terrain. Wadsworth experimented with colored inks and papers in a variety of combinations to produce different visual effects and sensations.

Wadsworth was born in the flourishing northern industrial town of Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, to a family who had grown wealthy from their textile mills. In order to manage these mills, in 1906, he went to Munich to study mechanical draftsmanship and German. Instead, Wadsworth became interested in art, which he continued to pursue once back in Britain. Named for the northern British port, Newcastle, his first known print, reflects his training in mechanical illustration and woodcut as well as the Vorticist interest in industrialization and modernity. Wadsworth monumentalized the cold, hard features of the factory’s tools and equipment—such as the sawtooth and zigzag forms—to evoke the superhuman power of the machine and his family’s business. The image was reproduced in 1914 in the first issue of the Vorticist journal BLAST, in which a manifesto declared "Bless England, Industrial Island machine, pyramidal workshop."

Wadsworth was an intelligence officer for the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during World War I. Interior was created in the Greek village of Mudros, where he lived during this time. Compressed Cubist structures appear to shift in space, their geometric forms pushing and pulling as they extend to the perimeter of the print. While in Mudros, Wadsworth wrote to John Quinn, a collector of Vorticist art, to share that he was working on designs he hoped to make as woodcuts later in Britain. In his letter, he praised the technique of woodcutting, writing that he found the prints to be "probably the best in that they are the most complete—that is to say, the means of expression is in a more complete accordance with the thing expressed in there than some of the other things which are perhaps more experimental and less mature."

Street Singers is the only figurative work from Wadsworth’s Vorticist period. While the title and orientation of the forms link the print to the visible world—in particular, public street performers—the three figures are so reductive, angular, and hard-edged that they recall mechanical parts, such as those in Newcastle. Reinforcing the connection between the works are the interlocking geometric dark gray and black patches, which resemble metallic machinery bits. Despite utilizing an aesthetic that evokes the power and impersonal qualities of contemporary industry, Wadsworth’s prints were decidedly handmade and his technique—woodcutting—the oldest within printmaking. He admired the precision of woodcut, claiming it "appeals to me more than any of the other similar mediums (etchings, lithographs, mezzotints etc.) . . . [because] it leaves nothing at all to accident."

After he returned from the Mediterranean, Wadsworth became involved in the "dazzle ships" project. Dazzle camouflage was developed in 1917 by Norman Wilkinson, a British academic marine artist and Royal Navy lieutenant commander, to counter torpedo attacks by German U-boats, which had sunk numerous Allied warships and passenger ships (including approximately 925 British ships in a period of just nine months, averaging twenty-three ships a week). The dazzle system involved multicolored optical patterns applied to warships to disorient the German submarines that patrolled British waters. Wadsworth did not create the designs but was one of ten lieutenants who supervised their application to over two thousand vessels, dubbed "dazzle ships." The bold patterns, which recalled Wadsworth’s earlier Vorticist work, can be seen in these woodcuts inspired by the artist’s experiences.

In 1918, Wadsworth made several trips through the Black Country while traveling between Liverpool and London. Located in England’s West Midlands section, the region received its name in the nineteenth century due to the soot from heavy industry and coal production that covered the area. Wadsworth was fascinated by the scale of manufacturing, especially the effects that its waste (such as slag heaps from coal and air pollution from factories) had on the environment. He printed this powerful scene of fiery iron and steel furnaces and polluted skies on different colored papers. The vivid orange hue of the paper here seems to reflect the tones emitted by the furnaces, echoing American diplomat Elihu Burritt’s earlier statement that, due to its manufacturing, the region was "black by day and red by night."

Wadsworth applied the bold geometric aesthetic he developed when affiliated with Vorticism, a modernist British movement, to these striking images of "dazzle ships." Developed in 1917, the dazzle system involved multicolored optical patterns designed to disorient German U-boats that patrolled the waters around Britain launching torpedoes that sunk both Allied warships and passenger ships. Wadsworth, who worked for the navy, supervised the application of the camouflage. In his prints, he reduced its many colors to a more severe black-and-white pattern. He also played with perspective, flattening the ships in Dock Scene and adopting an elevated vantage point for Liverpool Shipping.

Beginning in 1928, Power made several drawings of escalators at the Tottenham Court Road station that relate to his work Whence & Whither?. Many convey a sense of anxiety generated by the subterranean world, with its long, winding tunnels and automated stairs; an inscription on one drawing reads: "THE ROBOTTOMLESS PIT, HOMO MECHANIENS." Here, however, leaping above Power’s spiky escalators and pointed Gothic arches are several gravity-defying horses in brown ink. Andrews drew the racing horses, which are associated with those in her linocut Steeplechasing. Their graceful forms provide an element of levity to the more somber tone of Power’s darker, heavier drawing.

Flight wrote two manuals and numerous articles on the linocut technique. Reproduced here on the cover of his 1934 manual, The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing, is Speed, which became closely associated with him. Its long sinuous lines, simplified shapes, spare decorative elements, and flat planes of color showed that linocut was an ideal technique with which to create dynamic images of contemporary life. Linoleum—machine-made, inexpensive, new to fine art, and readily available—exemplified Flight’s belief in democratizing art production. Although tools were sold for linocutting, amateur artists of all ages could make linocuts in their homes, with materials at hand (such as a knife or an umbrella rib, and a sheet of soft linoleum) and without the expertise and expense of professional printers.

Although perhaps best known for his powerful war-related works and his earlier association with Futurism, between 1921 and 1939, Nevinson also made posters advertising public transportation. Like other posters commissioned by Frank Pick for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London and later London Transport, To Lovers’ Lane was intended to promote commuting and holiday travel via trains, trams, buses, and underground trains. In contrast to posters that used a hard-edged modernism to convey the hustle and bustle of city life, Nevinson’s works feature bucolic images of the British countryside and leisure activities. British domestic travel became popular during the interwar decades, with many people, especially city dwellers, visiting both suburbs and more rural areas, often aided by guidebooks promoting activities and sites to visit.

Although perhaps best known for his powerful war-related works and his earlier association with Futurism, between 1921 and 1939, Nevinson also made posters advertising public transportation. Like other posters commissioned by Frank Pick for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London and later London Transport, Home Counties: no. 4 Kent was intended to promote commuting and holiday travel via trains, trams, buses, and underground trains. In contrast to posters that used a hard-edged modernism to convey the hustle and bustle of city life, Nevinson’s works feature bucolic images of the British countryside and leisure activities. British domestic travel became popular during the interwar decades, with many people, especially city dwellers, visiting both suburbs and more rural areas, often aided by guidebooks promoting activities and sites to visit.

The American artist and designer Edward McKnight Kauffer worked in London between 1914 and 1940 and was considered the preeminent poster artist in Britain in the interwar period. He was best known for posters commissioned by Frank Pick for both the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (known as the London Underground or Tube) and the London Passenger Transport Board (later London Transport) to promote public transportation. Largely unknown at the time of his hire, Kauffer published his first poster for Pick in 1915 and eventually produced over 120 works for Pick and his agencies. Made for the Underground, this poster advertises bus routes to Reigate, a town in Surrey. Kauffer reimagined the British landscape through an expressionist lens, using bold, contrasting colors and simplified shapes.

Tschudi’s sketchbook gives tremendous insight into her working process in preparing the print titled Sword Drill. The soldier standing at the right edge of the watercolor composition has been pasted in, cut from among the iterations in graphite on the opposite page, and enhanced with color. The compression and repetition of the lunging soldiers in a diagonal line that appears to extend infinitely into the distance brings a dynamic sense of movement to the work.

Flight wrote two manuals and numerous articles on the linocut technique and why linocut was an ideal technique with which to create dynamic images of contemporary life. Linoleum—machine-made, inexpensive, new to fine art, and readily available—exemplified Flight’s belief in democratizing art production. Although tools were sold for linocutting, amateur artists of all ages could make linocuts in their homes, with materials at hand (such as a knife or an umbrella rib, and a sheet of soft linoleum) and without the expertise and expense of professional printers.