{"title":"Claude Flight","description":"\u003cp\u003eClaude Flight (1881-1955) was a British artist and the great champion of the linocut. From 1926 he taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where he encouraged students to see the cheap, simple linocut as a modern art for everyone. His own prints capture the rush of London life, with buses, crowds and traffic shown in swirling lines and bright colour. His students included \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/cyril-power\"\u003eCyril Power\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/ethel-spowers\"\u003eEthel Spowers\u003c\/a\u003e. Explore more \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/british-art\"\u003eBritish art\u003c\/a\u003e posters.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"claude-flight-speed-1922-linocut-exhibition-poster","title":"Claude Flight 'Speed' Linocut Exhibition Poster","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn open-top red omnibus swings down Regent Street, its side lettered SPEED, while the curved facades of the street bend with it and a policeman on point duty holds back the traffic. Claude Flight cut this colour linocut in about 1922, and it became the image he chose to introduce the medium to the public: the frontispiece to his 1927 handbook \u003cem\u003eLino-cuts: A Hand-book of Linoleum-cut Colour Printing\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlight (1881–1955) came to art late, after spells as an engineer, a librarian, a farmer and a bee-keeper, and studied at Heatherley's in London from 1913. He first used linoleum in 1919 and promoted it from then on as a democratic medium, cheap to buy and quick to cut, that could put original prints within reach of anyone. \u003cem\u003eSpeed\u003c\/em\u003e is one of his early attempts to make the material carry the pace of a modern city. Every form is drawn in motion, the bus tilting into its turn, the pedestrians reduced to strokes, the building line pulled into a single curve. He knew the Italian Futurists' work, and Marinetti had already declared that London's bright motor-buses made it a Futurist city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom 1926 to 1930 Flight taught the linocut class at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico, where Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Lill Tschudi and Eileen Mayo learned the method. In July 1929 he organised the First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery on Old Bond Street, an event that ran annually until 1937 and led to purchases by the British Museum and the V\u0026amp;A. The Grosvenor School prints of the 1930s, with their spiralling escalators and racing cyclists, grow directly out of this image of a bus on Regent Street.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur poster imagines a spring 1959 survey of Flight's London prints at the Talbot Harlheigh Gallery on New Bond Street, four years after his death and at a time when the Grosvenor School prints had largely fallen from view. The typography is set in a light inscriptional roman on an off-white ground, the restrained house style of a Mayfair dealer's announcement card at the end of the 1950s, with the print given the whole upper half of the sheet and the exhibition details kept to two lines at top and bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"artposterarchive","offers":[{"title":"A3 (11.7 x 16.5 ins)","offer_id":56887195763074,"sku":"APA-FLIGHT-SPEED","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A2 (16.5 x 23.4 ins)","offer_id":56887195795842,"sku":"APA-FLIGHT-SPEED","price":38.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"18 x 24 ins (45 x 60 cm)","offer_id":56887195828610,"sku":"APA-FLIGHT-SPEED","price":38.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A1 (23.4 x 33.1 ins)","offer_id":56887195861378,"sku":"APA-FLIGHT-SPEED","price":56.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"24 x 36 ins (60 x 90 cm)","offer_id":56887195894146,"sku":"APA-FLIGHT-SPEED","price":56.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0563\/5260\/4323\/files\/Exhibition-Poster-001_dda5722b-187f-4c4d-84a4-e8e2a9ae1108.jpg?v=1788442861"},{"product_id":"grosvenor-school-linocuts-gallery-wall-set-of-3-exhibition-posters-power-flight-spowers","title":"Grosvenor School Linocuts - Gallery Wall Set of 3 Exhibition Posters (Power, Flight, Spowers)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThree exhibition posters for the linocut artists of the Grosvenor School, sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints: Cyril Power's 'The Eight', Claude Flight's 'Speed' and Ethel Spowers' 'The Giant Stride'.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Grosvenor School of Modern Art opened in Pimlico in 1925, and from the following year Claude Flight taught a linocut class there that became the centre of a movement. Flight argued that linoleum, cheap and quick to cut, was the democratic printmaking medium of the machine age, and he pushed his students towards subjects to match: traffic, tube trains, sport, the crowd. 'Speed', which he cut in 1922 before the school existed, is the manifesto print, a red General omnibus swinging round a curve of tall buildings with the whole street bent by its motion.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCyril Power was in his fifties when he joined Flight's class, an architect by training who shared a studio with Sybil Andrews and produced the school's most ambitious prints. 'The Eight' takes a rowing crew and reduces it to a repeated arc of white shirts and orange blades against a violet river, each figure a beat in a rhythm. Ethel Spowers came from Melbourne to study with Flight in 1928 and returned to Australia to work in the same idiom; 'The Giant Stride' (1933) catches children swinging out from a maypole in a wheel of colour, the ground and sky tilting with them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach poster imagines a later exhibition of the artist's work, designed to the conventions of its date. Power's is a 1958 show of prints depicting London at Richmond Town Hall, set in a plain municipal sans-serif; Flight's a 1959 exhibition of his London prints at the Talbot Harlheigh Gallery, New Bond Street, in Albertus-style capitals over a Times-style serif; Spowers' a 1983 survey, 'Ethel Spowers and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art', at Wilson Watson Fine Art in Mayfair. Together they hang as a single wall of British modernism at its most exuberant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese are designed posters, not historical reproductions. They have been created as part of Art Poster Archive, a project focused on period-accurate exhibition graphics for artists and movements. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"artposterarchive","offers":[{"title":"A3 (11.7 x 16.5 ins)","offer_id":56891894301058,"sku":null,"price":64.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A2 (16.5 x 23.4 ins)","offer_id":56891894333826,"sku":null,"price":100.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"18 x 24 ins (45 x 60 cm)","offer_id":56891894366594,"sku":null,"price":100.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"A1 (23.4 x 33.1 ins)","offer_id":56891894399362,"sku":null,"price":145.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"24 x 36 ins (60 x 90 cm)","offer_id":56891894432130,"sku":null,"price":145.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0563\/5260\/4323\/files\/grosvenor_3.png?v=1788626412"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0563\/5260\/4323\/collections\/Exhibition-Poster-001_dda5722b-187f-4c4d-84a4-e8e2a9ae1108.jpg?v=1794578862","url":"https:\/\/artposterarchive.com\/collections\/claude-flight.oembed","provider":"artposterarchive","version":"1.0","type":"link"}