Linoleum, London, and Lousy Advertising: The Grosvenor Linocut Revisited

When the Grosvenor School of Modern Art began in 1925, it set out to break the rules. Fuelled by the democratic optimism of the day, its founder Iain Macnab established no entry requirements, fixed exams, or formal curriculum. He admitted students regardless of their background and granted them the freedom to study what and when they pleased. A hundred years later it can still sound absurd, but in its short existence, Macnab’s freewheeling experiment fostered a printmaking renaissance in interwar Britain. Under one roof, a small group of progressive artists championed a lesser-known medium which they believed held the power to transform the public reception of art.

Of all the staff at Grosvenor, none were more popular than Claude Flight, a printmaker who preached his own artistic gospel: the linocut. Also known as linoleum printing, the technique mirrors woodblock printmaking — carving a design then printing ink from the uncarved areas — but replaces wood for linoleum (that stuff your grandparents’ floors are made of). Flight taught both the fundamentals of linocutting and his own expressive style, which emphasised abstraction and a limited colour palette. Adapting his techniques to develop their own aesthetics, Grosvenor artists like Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power, and Lill Tschudi soon became the new masters of the medium.

The school frequently took the speed and rapid modernisation of daily life as its subject, with fluid, curvilinear forms displaying life at its dynamic peak. Living in the aftermath of World War I, the linocuts encapsulate the parallel optimism and anxiety of the time — the colourful curves playfully bending a racecar in one print warp the faceless, toiling labourers of another. Some of the finest works include Andrews’ Hyde Park and Rush Hour, Power’s The Eight, and Ethel Spowers’ The Plough, with infinitely more worth exploring.

To Flight, the linocut was the ultimate reflection of his group’s democratic ambitions. As a relatively new and unexplored medium, it was free from the shadows of past artists, and, as linoleum is cheaper and easier to carve than wood (due to its softness and lack of grain), even the most untrained of artists could try. But his real ambitions lay with the public. Given the proper time and development, he saw linocuts as an artform for the people, a handcrafted medium that the ordinary person could buy for the price of a beer or movie. When paired with the right elementary art education, he argued, albeit idealistically, that the average citizen would choose art over beer or movies, as they would know “that aesthetic pleasure surmounts creature comforts, and that the harmony, the intensity, and the vision which a good work of art affords would be his for the asking”. Flight’s dream never materialised, of course, as a linocut in his day cost about a middle-class week’s worth of wages and few people would sacrifice their pint for a print.

But another factor complicates the argument for the Grosvenor linocuts today, as their closest living relative may be none other than Corporate Memphis. If you’re unfamiliar with Corporate Memphis, it’s merely because you didn’t know the name; the style appears in advertising everywhere — that flat, minimalist illustration style of colourful, cartoonish human figures with curved, exaggerated limbs and little to no facial features. Since peaking in popularity around 2018, the style has declined in popularity, widely criticised as simplistic, lifeless, uninspired, and falsely advertising diversity. With the exception of the last critique, one could attach such labels to the Grosvenor style as well. But despite basic similarities, the two are not equal. Firstly, because Corporate Memphis is not art, it’s advertising — the mere use of visual techniques does not constitute artistic expression. But more importantly, the linocuts display a conscious, deliberate form of abstraction, not merely to expedite creation but to articulate the public consciousness of their time. 

Grosvenor’s linocut movement was over soon after it began. Macnab’s school shut down in 1940 and now serves as part of the nearby Heatherley School. Many artists left London, finding moderate success elsewhere but rarely drawing attention in other mediums. Today, their art can easily seem a precursor to the commercial illustrations many of us have come to detest. But behind those faceless, flowing figures was a genuine pursuit to create new, affordable art for the masses. While abstract, it was anything but lifeless.

Illustration by Elizabeth Lang