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…