Overview
One of the most remarkable episodes in British printmaking is
the rise of the humble linocut in the 1930s. English artist and
teacher Claude Flight championed the linocut and in the process
attracted many talented students to his classes at London's
Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Speed & Flight
includes the works of his most gifted students - artists such as
Cyril E Power and Sybil Andrews, Ethel Spowers and Lill
Tschudi.
With their bold colours and dynamic rhythms, these colour
linocuts showing commuter-filled escalators and whizzing
rollercoasters vividly evoke the speed and movement of the modern
machine age. Flight and his followers combined the bright colours,
geometric forms and rhythmic vitality of Art Deco with Italian
Futurism's need for speed. Speed & Flight reveals how
the group captured a sense movement through the themes of a city's
energy, physical work, sport and leisure.
A democratic medium for the modern age, Flight argued that the
group's linocuts should be sold for no more than the price paid 'by
the average man for his daily beer or his cinema ticket'. First
exhibited at London's Redfern Gallery in the late 1920s and
designed to fit on an inner-city apartment wall, these artworks
soon found their way into the collections of major public
museums.
New Zealander Sir Rex Nan Kivell gifted these artworks to
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 1953, and they are part of a
much larger collection of art by leading British modernists.
17 March - 20 June 2012
Level 1
Free entry