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Clark Exhibit Celebrates Underappreciated Medium
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
03:44PM / Saturday, April 25, 2015
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Clark Art Institute's exhibit 'Machine Age Modernism' features Claude Flight's linocut prints, a form of printing popular in 1920s and '30s London.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — In the first part of the 20th century, Claude Flight and his disciples were doing some cutting edge work.

Literally.

Flight is an innovator and leader of a short-lived boom of linocut printmakers that thrived in London in the 1920s and '30s.

He and his contemporaries are celebrated in the Clark Art Institute's exhibit "Machine Age Modernism," on view in the Clark Center through May 17.

The show features colorful, intricate and often highly abstract images of everyday life in England between World Wars I and II. It also gives a sense of the political sensibilities of Flight and artists he mentored at London's Grovesnor School of Modern Art.

"He was political in the sense of who he wanted to buy these works of art," exhibit curator Jay A. Clarke said in a recent media event at the Clark.

"He wanted this to be art for the people. His idea was a worker could buy one of these prints for the price of a beer. He also had this idea that you could go to a library and take out a print already framed, like you would a book. His was a very egalitarian, protosocialist idea for making prints."

The themes of Flight's disciples and the very medium they chose were a bit countercultural as well for the interwar years in England.

"I would say [the themes are] political not in the way of who was fighting whom at war, but political in the sense that the Royal Academy only promoted a very elitist form of art," Clarke said. "This form of art shows simplicity and abstraction. Working in an abstract style was sort of a political statement at the time.

"You were working in the avant-garde. You were going against the every day. But there's no question that the imagery was part of that as well: the worker, the person on the street, not the elegant woman sitting in a room in front of a mirror somewhere. The imagery also has a power to it."

The images in the current show were created using knives and linoleum to make blocks that would be covered in paint and pressed down onto paper to create the final product — a process that would not be out of place in an elementary school art class, Clarke noted.

The accessibility of linocuts appealed to Flight but kept linocut practitioners from being fully appreciated in their time.

"At the time, what was really the most heralded printmaking medium in England was wood cut," Clarke said. "And that seems like a very intellectual medium. You often think of woodcuts in terms of book illustrations. It's a very literary, high-brow sort of art. And you see reviews saying linocut is 'crude' and 'low brow.'

"But Flight really elevated the form."

Flight and his colleagues, that is. And the Clark exhibit features many of them, including several women who broke the mold and found their artistic voice working in the medium.

Clarke said some of the works in the show — like Lill Tschudi's "Ice Hockey" or Margaret Barnard's "The Rowers" — show how women of the day were exploring new themes.

"I think the sporting imagery was a way for women artists to depict the male body," Clarke said.

"This exhibition has more women artists than men, which I think is possibly a first in the Clark's history. But I can't say that for sure."

One of the prominent artists on display in "Machine Age Modernism" is Sybil Andrews, who was nominally the school secretary at the Grovesnor School but in reality was an accomplished artist in her own right.

She collaborated with Cyril Power on two works that kick off the exhibit, a pair of colorful posters commissioned for London's Underground to promote tourist destinations in the English countryside. Those two works are signed "Andrew Power," an invented combination of Andrews' and Power's surnames.

Andrews went on to emigrate to Canada, and her collection, papers and linocut blocks are kept at Calgary's Glenbow Museum, which helped Clarke and curatorial assistant Megan Kosinski do research for the exhibit.

The prints on display are from the private collection of Daniel Cowin, whose widow, Joyce, invited Clarke into her Manhattan home to view the works, which are being shown together publicly for the first time.

"It makes perfect sense as an extension of the Manton Collection of British art that that was given to us in 2007," Clarke said. "That's 18th and 19th century British art. This really brings us up to the 20th century.

"It's really an important opportunity for us to showcase early 20th century material, which is becoming more of a focus of our collection."

Clarke, the Clark's Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, said "Machine Age Modernism" can help shed some light on an often overlooked movement.

"They had this great flowering, up until Britain's entry in the second World War, and then the linocut movement sort of went into thin air," she said. "People were still creating them, but I think with the Depression and Britain's entry into the war, this printmaking movement sort of died out."

"Machine Age Modernism" is on display through May 17. The Clark is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20; free for Clark members, children 18 and younger and students with valid ID. The Clark plans a free Family Day in conjunction with the exhibit on May 3.

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