PROVENANCE
DeVooght Gallery Ltd., Vancouver
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Calgary

LITERATURE
Susan Mertens, “Sybil’s Great Splash with Art,” Vancouver Sun, January 16, 1982, front page of the Entertainment section, unpaginated
Peter White, Sybil Andrews, Glenbow Museum, 1982, reproduced page 37, full page colour, and page 57
Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, 1995, page 114, reproduced front cover and page 114
Clifford S. Ackley, editor, Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints, 1914 – 1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2008, reproduced page 81, a detail image reproduced page 188 and the four linoleum blocks for Speedway reproduced page 193
Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, Osborne Samuel Gallery, 2015, reproduced page 76
Janet Nicol, On the Curve: The Life and Art of Sybil Andrews, 2019, reproduced page 48

EXHIBITED
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Sybil Andrews, September 14 – October 22, 1982, same image, catalogue #29
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints, 1914 – 1939, January 3 – June 1, 2008, traveling in 2008 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, same image, catalogue #30, and the four linoleum blocks for Speedway, in the collection of the Glenbow Museum, exhibited catalogue #14-107
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Sybil Andrews: Art & Life, October 19, 2019 – January 12, 2020, same image

Born in Bury St. Edmunds, England, Sybil Andrews produced drawings, watercolours, monoprints and oil paintings, but it is her linocuts for which she is most famous and for which she attained international acclaim. Speedway is considered one of her finest linocuts.

During World War I, Andrews worked making airplane parts in Coventry, and after the war she returned to Bury St. Edmunds, where she met architect Cyril Power. In 1922, at the age of 24, Andrews left Bury St. Edmunds with Power (who was almost 50) to study art at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Three years later, Power and Andrews were appointed by Iain Macnab to staff his newly established Grosvenor School of Modern Art, with Andrews becoming the school secretary.

In 1926, while at the Grosvenor School, Andrews and Power met Claude Flight, who taught them how to cut and print from linoleum blocks (a new art form at the time). Andrews commented in a 1982 newspaper article: “There was no accepted way of treating the block, so we were all experimenting. We didn’t know what effects would be achieved until we had actually printed them. As you can imagine, many of the blocks ended up in the wastebasket.”

From 1930 to July 1938, Andrews and Power shared a small studio at 2 Brook Green in Hammersmith, London, and developed a common aesthetic in their work. This informal working partnership produced an extraordinary body of work—some of the finest prints of the 1930s. It was a period of widespread change, when new materials such as linoleum emerged, a period when art, industrial design, architecture and fashion design were transformed. Andrews’s themes were the dynamism of the modern machine age and the movement of the human figure at work or sport, usually executed using only four linoleum blocks. In total, Andrews produced an incredibly consistent body of 76 linocuts, of which 43 were made from 1929 to 1939—considered her best period—when she shared the studio with Power. Andrews’s linocuts are acclaimed to have surpassed those of her teacher Flight, and many art historians consider Andrews to be the most gifted of the Grosvenor School artists.

In 1938, Andrews and Power gave up their studio at Brook Green. During World War II, Andrews worked in the British Power Boat Company shipyard at Southampton, where she met her future husband, Walter Morgan. After the war Andrews and Morgan immigrated to Canada, settling in Campbell River, at that time a remote logging town, on Vancouver Island, BC. In 1951, Andrews built a simple studio and resumed her printmaking; she also taught art and music classes.

Speedway is Andrews’s most important and highly sought-after linocut. Its importance is reflected in the fact that this work was chosen for the front cover from all the works of the seven Grosvenor School artists profiled in Stephen Coppel’s catalogue raisonné Linocuts of the Machine Age. Speedway was created when Andrews was still in London and working in the Brook Green studio. Coppel wrote, “This image of motor-bike trials was originally conceived as a poster commission for the London Passenger Transport Board in the 1930s, although no poster was ever made.” This print embodies the dynamism of machine-age speed that fascinated the modern world.

This is a very fine impression on cream fibrous oriental laid paper.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars