Sybil Andrews

Sybil Andrews (1898–1992) was one of the leading artists of the Grosvenor School and is best known for her dynamic colour linocuts of sport, transport, labour and rural life. Combining bold colour with sweeping curves and strongly simplified forms, she developed a highly individual visual language that captured movement and physical energy with remarkable economy.

Born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Andrews began drawing and painting at an early age. During the First World War she worked as a welder in an aircraft factory while continuing her artistic studies through John Hassall’s correspondence course. After the war she returned to Bury St Edmunds, where she taught art and met Cyril Edward Power, with whom she would form a close artistic partnership.

Andrews and Power moved to London in 1922. She studied at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art and later worked as secretary at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where Claude Flight taught linocut. Flight’s advocacy of the colour linocut as an inexpensive, modern medium had a profound impact on Andrews, who quickly mastered its possibilities.

The Redfern Gallery played an important role at the outset of Andrews’s career. In 1929 her work was included in Claude Flight’s First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the gallery, alongside Cyril Power and other artists associated with the Grosvenor School. The exhibition inaugurated a series of presentations of British colour linocuts at Redfern during the 1930s and helped establish the medium with a wider public. Andrews continued to show at the gallery throughout the decade.

Her subjects ranged from London transport, sport and industrial labour to agricultural life in Suffolk. Prints such as Speedway, Steeplechasing, The Winch and Michaelmas transform bodies and machinery into rhythmic patterns of movement. Although her style shared something of Futurism’s fascination with speed and modernity, Andrews also applied the same dynamic language to traditional rural subjects, creating some of the most memorable images associated with the Grosvenor School.

Andrews and Power worked closely together during the interwar years, sharing a studio and collaborating on posters for the London Passenger Transport Board under the joint name “Andrew-Power”. Their working partnership ended in 1938.

During the Second World War Andrews returned to welding, this time in a shipyard, where she met Walter Morgan, whom she married in 1943. In 1947 they emigrated to Canada and settled in Campbell River on Vancouver Island. Andrews continued to make and teach art there for the rest of her life, while her subjects increasingly included the landscapes, people and working life of western Canada.

Her reputation grew considerably during her later years. In the 1980s Glenbow in Calgary began researching and exhibiting her work, and Andrews subsequently gave the museum a substantial group of works, together with archival material, making it an important centre for the study of her life and career.

The Redfern Gallery’s connection with Andrews and the Grosvenor School extended well beyond the original exhibitions of the late 1920s and 1930s. From the early 1980s the gallery once again began showing colour linocuts by Andrews, Cyril Power and their contemporaries, helping to renew interest in the Grosvenor School and its place within British modernism.

Andrews’s work is held in major public collections including the British Museum and Glenbow, Calgary. Her colour linocuts are now recognised as some of the finest achievements of British printmaking between the wars.