Grosvenor School Linocuts - Gallery Wall Set of 3 Exhibition Posters (Power, Flight, Spowers)

Three exhibition posters for the linocut artists of the Grosvenor School, sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints: Cyril Power's 'The Eight', Claude Flight's 'Speed' and Ethel Spowers' 'The Giant Stride'. The Grosvenor School of Modern Art opened in Pimlico in 1925, and from the following year Claude Flight taught a linocut class there that became the centre of a movement. Flight argued that linoleum, cheap and quick to cut, was the democratic printmaking medium of the machine age, and he pushed his students towards subjects to match: traffic, tube trains, sport, the crowd. 'Speed', which he cut in 1922 before the school existed, is the manifesto print, a red General omnibus swinging round a curve of tall buildings with the whole street bent by its motion. Cyril Power was in his fifties when he joined Flight's class, an architect by training who shared a studio with Sybil Andrews and produced the school's most ambitious prints. 'The Eight' takes a rowing crew and reduces it to a repeated arc of white shirts and orange blades against a violet river, each figure a beat in a rhythm. Ethel Spowers came from Melbourne to study with Flight in 1928 and returned to Australia to work in the same idiom; 'The Giant Stride' (1933) catches children swinging out from a maypole in a wheel of colour, the ground and sky tilting with them. Each poster imagines a later exhibition of the artist's work, designed to the conventions of its date. Power's is a 1958 show of prints depicting London at Richmond Town Hall, set in a plain municipal sans-serif; Flight's a 1959 exhibition of his London prints at the Talbot Harlheigh Gallery, New Bond Street, in Albertus-style capitals over a Times-style serif; Spowers' a 1983 survey, 'Ethel Spowers and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art', at Wilson Watson Fine Art in Mayfair. Together they hang as a single wall of British modernism at its most exuberant. These are designed posters, not historical reproductions. They have been created as part of Art Poster Archive, a project focused on period-accurate exhibition graphics for artists and movements.