Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, through May 17
Williamstown — One of the great joys to be had from looking at art comes when an exhibition reveals something quite different from what you had expected. The show that is now on display at the Clark does precisely that.
You probably have not heard of any of the artists featured here, though there is no reason why you should have done: their little prints have mostly slipped beneath the attention of mainstream art history. So we should congratulate curator Jay A. Clarke and her team for putting together this eye-opening exhibition of their work, and in particular for drawing attention to Sybil Andrews (1898-1992), a largely forgotten artist of the first rank.
Even the very earliest prints here are just over 100 years old, though the world in which they were made seems unimaginably distant from our own. London during the First World War and then in the 1920s and ’30s was a rapidly industrializing city that was forced to redefine its relationships with the rest of Europe, and with a world increasingly impatient with Britain’s imperialist assumptions. Clearly defined class and gender roles, which for centuries had been at the core of the city’s stability, seemed to have been thrown up in the air. And artists were picking sides in the conflict between stuffy academicism and the modernism that had been gaining momentum for decades just over 200 miles away in Paris.
All of this is reflected in the work that the Clark’s glittering show brings together. It begins with just a hint of the enthusiasm for the Great War that was swiftly snuffed out as word of carnage began to dominate the front pages of the London newspapers. But the heart of things here is the small circle of artists who gathered around the printmaker Claude Flight who taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art from 1926. Flight’s chosen medium was the linocut, a form of printing which then as now was regarded as slightly beneath the interests of true artists. The technique is more or less the same used in woodcut prints, but the printing blocks are cut from softer (and cheaper) flooring linoleum. For the splendid multicolored prints included here different blocks had to be cut for each constituent color and then inked and printed separately.
The whole process has an air of traditional craft to it, but ironically Flight saw it as particularly suited to images of dynamic modern life. In addition, because the prints could be produced cheaply and in large numbers, it suited his socialist principles. He imagined working men buying prints for the price of a glass of beer or borrowing them from a library.
Quite how the Grosvenor School socialists viewed the position of the women in their number is open to speculation, but there are actually more women artists in this show than men, and its star, who is represented by more works than anyone else, is the spectacularly gifted Sybil Andrews. Andrews was apparently underestimated her entire life. She entered the school not as a teacher or a student but as a secretary; she was the real artist in the collaborative projects made with Cyril Power under the masculinized pseudonym Andrew-Power; and she ended her days dirt poor in Canada. But along the way she made uniquely powerful images of both urban and rural modern life that repay a lot of looking. Tillers of the Soil is clearly a romanticized vision of agricultural labor, but there is something genuinely compelling about her simplification of appearances and the rhythmic energy that she conjures with it. The picture is little more than a foot across and printed in only four colors, but Andrews’ ability to evoke a fresh spring day and the bulk and power of a team of horses is something exceptional. Do not miss the opportunity to see it.
