Cyril Power, The Tube Train

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)