Lill Tschudi

Lill Tschudi (1911–2004) was a Swiss printmaker and one of the most accomplished artists associated with the Grosvenor School. Best known for her colour linocuts of modern life, she captured the speed, movement and energy of the interwar years through sharply simplified forms, strong diagonals and bold combinations of colour.

Born in Schwanden, in the Swiss canton of Glarus, Tschudi became interested in colour linocutting after seeing prints by the Austrian artist Norbertine Bresslern-Roth. In 1929 she moved to London to study at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where she worked under Claude Flight, the leading advocate of the colour linocut in Britain.

Flight encouraged his students to treat the linocut as a modern medium suited to the imagery of contemporary life. Tschudi responded with subjects including jazz musicians, motor racing, the London Underground, sporting events and men working on electricity pylons. Prints such as Jazz Band, Fixing the Wires and Sticking up Posters combine the influence of Futurism and Vorticism with a highly individual sense of rhythm and design.

Tschudi’s association with The Redfern Gallery began while she was still a student. Her work was included in British Linocuts at Redfern in 1930, followed by British Lino-Cuts 1931, Modern Colour Prints in 1932 and Colour Prints and Contemporary Oils in 1933. These exhibitions formed part of the important series initiated at Redfern by Claude Flight after the gallery’s landmark First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts in 1929.

In 1931 Tschudi left London for Paris, where she studied with André Lhote, Gino Severini and Fernand Léger. These encounters broadened her understanding of Cubism, Futurism and geometric abstraction, but Flight remained an important artistic mentor and correspondent. Tschudi continued to send work to him from Switzerland, maintaining a close connection with the British printmaking world.

Her print Fixing the Wires was reproduced by Flight in his 1934 book The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing, and is characteristic of her ability to transform an everyday modern subject into a dynamic arrangement of line and colour. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum both acquired impressions of the print during the 1930s.

Tschudi returned permanently to Switzerland in 1935, settling again in Schwanden. Although geographically removed from London, she continued to produce linocuts for many years and ultimately created more than 350 prints. From the mid-1940s her work also moved increasingly towards abstraction.

For much of her career Tschudi received greater recognition in Britain than in Switzerland, but this changed in later life. In 1986 she was awarded the Swiss National Print Prize, acknowledging her contribution to twentieth-century printmaking.

Her international reputation has grown considerably since her death in 2004. In 2008–10 her work was included in British Prints from the Machine Age: Rhythms of Modern Life, 1914–1939, shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Wolfsonian in Miami.

Tschudi’s work is held in major public collections including the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bibliothèque nationale de France and National Gallery of Australia.

The Redfern Gallery has continued to show Tschudi’s work alongside that of Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews, Cyril Edward Power and other artists of the Grosvenor School, renewing a connection that began with the gallery’s pioneering linocut exhibitions of the early 1930s.