Claude Flight

Claude Flight (1881–1955) was a pioneering British printmaker and the leading advocate of the colour linocut in Britain between the wars. Through his teaching, writing and exhibitions he transformed a modest and inexpensive medium into one of the most dynamic forms of modern printmaking, encouraging a generation of artists including Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews and Lill Tschudi.

Flight came relatively late to art. After working variously as an engineer, librarian, farmer and beekeeper, he began studying at Heatherley’s School of Art in 1912. His training was interrupted by the First World War, during which he served with the Royal Army Service Corps as a farrier, before returning to Heatherley’s after the war.

During the 1920s Flight became increasingly interested in the linocut, attracted by its directness, affordability and suitability for depicting modern life. Influenced by Futurism, Vorticism and Cubism, he developed a style characterised by sweeping curves, simplified forms and bright overlapping colour. Transport, sport, dancing and the speed of contemporary urban life became recurring subjects.

From 1926 to 1930 Flight taught linocutting at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. He was a passionate advocate of the medium, believing that inexpensive prints could make modern art accessible to a much wider public. His teaching had a profound influence on a group of artists who became collectively associated with the Grosvenor School.

The Redfern Gallery played a central role in Flight’s career and in the wider development of the British colour linocut. He exhibited individually at Redfern in 1927 and 1928, the latter including work made with his partner Edith Lawrence. In 1929, following a lecture at the Grosvenor School attended by Redfern co-director Knyvett Lee, Flight organised the gallery’s landmark First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts.

The success of the 1929 exhibition led to further exhibitions of British linocuts at Redfern in 1930 and 1931 and helped establish the medium both in Britain and internationally. Under the auspices of the gallery, exhibitions of linocuts were subsequently sent to the United States, China, Australia and Canada, while works by Flight and his circle entered major public collections including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Flight also published two influential manuals, Lino-Cuts: A Hand-Book of Linoleum-Cut Colour Printing in 1927 and The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing in 1934, which did much to disseminate his ideas internationally.

In 1922 Flight began a lifelong personal and artistic partnership with Edith Lawrence, with whom he later established an interior decoration business. After leaving the Grosvenor School in 1930 they settled in Wiltshire. A severe stroke in 1947 brought Flight’s artistic career to an end, and he died in 1955.

The Redfern Gallery’s connection with Flight and the Grosvenor School has remained an important part of its history. From the early 1980s the gallery again began presenting colour linocuts by Flight, Power, Andrews and their contemporaries, contributing to the renewed appreciation of this important chapter in British modernism.

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