Rhythms of Modern Life Exhibition
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This woodcut by Edward Wadsworth was one of my favorites of the show, not just for the woozy geometry and bracing perspective, but because it's so clearly enthralled with the machine age. Entitled "Drydocked for Scaling and Painting (Liverpool)," it's one of several wonderful Wadsworths in the show. -
Given how indebted the British prints in the show are to both cubism and Italian futurism, many of them deal overtly with speed. Here in "Speedway" by Sybil Andrews from 1934 we see a trio of motorcyclists nearly transformed into giant insects by their careening machines. -
Though the majority of the prints deal with technology, World War I, sports and city life, there are a few dedicated to people at their work. This colorful print "Rhumba Band II" by Swiss artists Lill Tschudi, who worked in England for nearly all of the 20th century, is a linocut from 1936. -
The eight rowers in Sybil Andrews's "Bringing in the Boat" take on the architectural form of the boat itself. -
Cyril E. Power's "The Merry-Go-Round" is a truly fearsome sight, and not the only print of the era to suggest that this new brand of mechanical amusement has beneath it the capacity for startling tragedy. -
"The Tube Train" by Cyril E. Power is a color linocut from 1834 that is one of a series in the show that deal with the London Underground. I love the comic quality of the image, as well as the sense that you're going round a curve. One of the least abstract in the exhibit, I do think that this print gets at the kind abstracted humanity that riding public transport seems to engender. -
"The Runners" by Claude Flight is one of the many prints devoted to sports. Most, like this one, drew their abstracted, active geometry from repeated images of athletes. Though here it's runners, other prints in the show so ice skater, rowers and wrestlers. -
Perhaps the most clear nod to the aesthetic advances in painting in the 20s comes from Claude Flight's 1926 color linocut "Spring, from The Four Seasons." -
Though the majority of these prints concern themselves with war machines, zooming cars and whirling pleasure machines, I loved Lill Tschudi's examination of where all that power comes from. Here "Fixing the Wires" gives us that same jazzy brand of abstraction applied not so much to vehicles as to infrastructure. -
Claude Flight's "Brooklands" from about 1929 literally shows a pair of screaming racecars catching fire as they hug a turn.
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Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939
The exhibition, featuring roughly one hundred lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and color linocuts by fourteen artists, examines the impact of Futurism and Cubism on British modernist printmaking from the beginning of World War I to the beginning of World War II. The principal artists represented in the exhibition are C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg—the early followers of Futurism and Vorticism—and Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power and Lill Tschudi—the later color linocut artists of London’s Grosvenor School of Art.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue organized thematically, with sections on World War I, Vorticism and Abstraction, Urban Life/Urban Dynamism, Sport, Labor and Industry, Entertainment and Leisure, Natural Forces,and a Technique section devoted to the color linocut (manuals, tools, blocks).
To see a selection of artworks from the show, please visit the slideshow.
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