How the Grosvenor School Made Modernity Visible
In the summer of 1929, a small exhibition opened at the Redfern Gallery in London that would quietly change the course of British printmaking. Claude Flight, teacher and tireless advocate of the colour linocut, had spent years arguing that this humble medium — cut from floor covering with a sharp knife, printed by hand — was the ideal art form for a democratic, machine-age society. The First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts, which ran from 4 to 27 July, was his proof of concept. Among the ninety-four works on show was Cyril Power's The Tube Staircase: the second most expensive print in the entire exhibition, priced at three and a half guineas. A contemporary critic writing in the Sunday Times called it "a design of great ingenuity embellished by a charming delicacy of colour."
The Grosvenor School of Modern Art, founded in Pimlico in 1925, brought together an unlikely group: an architect who had won the Sloane Medallion from the Royal Institute of British Architects; a young woman from Bury St Edmunds who had trained as a welder; a Swiss teenager who would go on to make over 450 linocuts; and a cohort of Australians who would carry the movement back to the southern hemisphere. What united them was Flight's central proposition: that the linocut, printed in colour from multiple blocks on thin oriental tissue paper, could capture the rhythm and visual texture of modern life in a way that no other medium could.
The school had no formal curriculum. Flight lectured on linocutting; Power lectured on architecture and architectural history; Frank Rutter, the art critic, lectured on painters from Cézanne to Picasso. Students — who arrived from as far as Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand, drawn by advertisements in The Studio magazine — studied what and when they wished. It was an unusually open model, and it produced an unusually coherent body of work. The subjects that recur across Grosvenor School prints are those of the interwar city: crowds surging through underpasses, buses hurtling down Regent Street, rowers on the Thames, fairground rides spinning above East London. The visual language is one of simplified planes, flattened colour, centrifugal momentum. Futurism had pointed toward this aesthetic; Vorticism had sharpened it; the Grosvenor School turned it into something legible, affordable, and specifically British.
Power's position within this group was distinctive. He came to linocut later than most, already in his early fifties, with a distinguished architectural career behind him. He had published a three-volume History of English Mediaeval Architecture in 1912 and lectured at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. When he turned to printmaking under Flight's instruction, his architectural eye shaped everything: the precision of the cutting, the structural logic of the compositions, the interest in engineering as visual spectacle. His early prints focused on buildings — Lavenham, Westminster Cathedral — but the Underground drew him in another direction. London's tube network, with its cast-iron columns, spiral staircases, and tiled platforms, offered him architecture that moved, architecture in which human circulation was built into the structure itself.
The Tube Staircase (1929) originated in sketches Power made of the spiral staircase at Russell Square station as early as 1926 — the same year he joined the Grosvenor School. The staircase at Russell Square twists for nearly two hundred steps down to platform level, its handrails and balusters repeating in diminishing arcs as it descends. Power's print compresses this vertical space into a tightly wound composition: the central column anchoring the image while the curved stair flights radiate outward in alternating planes of yellow, cobalt blue, and black. The result is less a depiction of a staircase than an analysis of one — a study in the geometry of descent, printed from five separate blocks.
By the mid-1930s, the Grosvenor School's moment had largely passed. Flight closed the school around 1940, and the prints entered a long period of neglect. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that collectors and curators began to reassess what had been made there. The revival gathered pace: a major exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2019, titled Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, drew 90,000 visitors and was the largest show of Grosvenor School work ever assembled. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York received a donation of 700 Modern British prints in 2019, the majority by Power and Andrews. Works that once sold for a few guineas now reach tens of thousands of pounds at auction.
What the reassessment confirmed is that the Grosvenor School artists were not simply making decorative objects — they were making arguments about what modern life looked like, and what art could do with it. Power's Underground prints, in particular, propose that the most visually compelling aspects of the contemporary city are not its monuments but its infrastructure: the escalators, the staircases, the platforms and tunnels that move millions of people through the ground beneath London every day. The Tube Staircase is the most concentrated statement of that proposition. It is a print about a functional object, made with a functional material, that manages to be formally remarkable. That it was the second most expensive work in the first linocut exhibition in 1929 suggests that at least some viewers recognised this at the time.
Our exhibition poster imagines a 1995 retrospective of Power's Underground prints at a fictional London gallery. Browse the Cyril Power: Below London poster, along with our full range of Art Poster Archive prints.