September 2019 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

In 2013 the London Underground celebrated its sesquicentennial, and to mark that milestone, the London Transport Museum launched “Poster Art 150”, a selection of the best posters from 150 years of London Underground marketing, everything from this from 1905…

…to this from 1998…

One of the many artists and designers who contributed to the London Underground’s campaigns happened to be one of the pioneers and leading exponents of the linocut in England: one Cyril Power.

In 1925, along with fellow artists Sybil Andrews, Iain McNab and Claude Flight, Power had co-founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Warwick Square, London. He became the principal lecturer and Sybil Andrews became school secretary. Power taught aesthetics in architecture; McNab taught woodcut, and Claude Flight ran classes in linocutting, the printmaking technique that is a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum is used for the relief surface. Soon, the school achieved a name for itself and it began to attract students from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.

Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews themselves attended Flight’s classes and became adept linocut artists. They began co-authoring prints together, and mounted a series of exhibitions which attracted considerable interest. In 1930, they established a studio in Hammersmith close to the River Thames, a location which inspired many prints by both artists, such as The Eight by Cyril Power and Bringing in the Boat by Sybil Andrews (both in the gallery below). Then, beginning in 1932, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (as the London Underground was then) commissioned a series of posters, including Power’s Tube Station (1932) and The Tube Train (1934).

Power’s linocuts explored the speed, movement, and flow of modern urban London, and you can clearly discern the movement and energy in his prints. It’s no surprise that one of his favourite subjects was the London Underground, a symbol of the modern industrial age. Let’s look at Power’s vibrant Tube linocuts and a selection of other linocuts by both him and Sybil Andrews.

The Tube Train (1934)

More Cyril Power Linocuts…

…and a selection of Sybil Andrews linocuts…

The period, in Germany, between the end of World War I in 1918 and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 is a fascinating one: there was a rapid emergence of innovation in the arts and sciences, embodied in the term “Weimar culture” (after the Weimar Republic, which was the unofficial designation for the German state at that time).

Luminaries in the sciences during the period included Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Max Born; Walter Gropius was busy inventing modern architecture and design with the Bauhaus movement; Ludwig Prandtl was pioneering aeronautical engineering. In the arts, German Expressionism was reaching its peak: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis expressed the public’s fascination with futurism and technology; concert halls were beginning to hear the atonal, modern experimental music of Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, whilst Bertolt Brecht was shaking up the theatre.

However, 1920s Berlin also had a dark underbelly and a reputation for decadence. There was a significant rise in prostitution, drug use, and crime. The cabaret scene, as documented by Britain’s Christopher Isherwood in his novel Goodbye to Berlin (which was eventually adapted into the musical movie, Cabaret), was emblematic of Berlin’s decadence. Many of the painters, sculptors, composers, architects, playwrights, and filmmakers associated with the time would be the same ones whose art would later be denounced as “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst) by Adolf Hitler.

A new cultural movement started around this time, however – named New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Its members turned away from the romantic ideals of German Expressionism and adopted instead an unsentimental perspective on the harsh realities of German society. A leading member of this movement was Otto Dix, and it is his paintings – satirical and at times savage — that I’m showcasing here. He wished to portray the decay of the post-war life; thus, frequent themes include the prostitutes and downtrodden of Berlin, their defects exaggerated to the point of caricature. He also painted many of the prominent characters from his milieu, in a style influenced by the dadaism and cubism art movements.

Here is a small selection of his art from the Weimar years, beginning with his 1928 tryptych, Metropolis (Großstadt), which incorporated crippled war veterans, prostitutes, musicians, dancers, and night club revellers into its three-panel indictment of contemporary Berlin life. Incidentally, when the Nazis came to power, Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes: that must have been excruciating for him!