MODERN TIMES: British Prints 1913-1939

The bold graphic images made by artists affiliated with Vorticism, British Futurism, and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art capture the optimism and anxiety of early 20th century Britain. Over the course of six decades, Leslie and Johanna Garfield have built an extraordinary collection which includes images by German Expressionists and Provincetown Printers as well as mid-century and contemporary prints, with a focus on such innovative figures as Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns and Dieter Roth. This glamorous book from an exhibition celebrates the Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of more than 700 rare and important British Modernist works on paper. It takes a look at the artistic and technical innovation of British printmaking from World War I to the eve of World War II, as artists from the Grosvenor School and beyond harnessed an emerging modernist style as artists sought to portray everyday life during the machine age. This richly illustrated volume reintroduces rare print works, demonstrating their relationship to other movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. Special attention is given to the linocut technique revolutionised by Claude Flight and his students as well as the pioneering works of artists such as C. R. W. Nevinson, Sybil Andrews with her strking Sledgehammers of 1933 and Haulers of 1929 showing labourers or her Speedway motorcycle racers from 1934 and racing, football and sprinting, Cyril E. Power with the Exam Room, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Edith Lawrence, Ursula Fookes, and Lill Tschudi with Underground 1930 of a tube station platform. Hundreds of colour examples with subjects like marching soldiers, the Black Country, furnaces, Yorkshire, Tube staircase, sticking up posters, the village fair, Hyde Park, the circus, theatre, the concert hall, the King's Guards, to autumn leaves and linocuts on fine Japanese paper. Handy chronology, large quality 200 pages. 23 x 26 cm.
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