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Kevin Griffin, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, February 01, 2008
Two exhibitions this month featuring the work of a British artist who lived in Campbell River are expected to increase the international recognition of her work in the history of 20th-century printmaking.
The artist is Sybil Andrews. She's considered the most accomplished artist of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, a London academy of modernist printmakers that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.
Her distinctive, bold linocuts from that period have begun escalating in value. Concert Hall, for example, sold at auction for a record $74,750 in November 2006, considerably more than the estimate of $10,000 to $15,000. Last year, another print called Speedway sold for $63,250.
Andrews's work is about to get much more attention. Heffel Fine Art Auction House is holding an online auction of about 35 of her prints, oil paintings and etchings starting Thursday. The works will be on view at the Heffel Gallery on Granville to Feb. 26.
The Heffel auction is being held to coincide with an exhibition of Andrews works in Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939, which has just opened at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. After Boston, the exhibition travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Robert Heffel, co-owner of Heffel Fine Arts, said that while Andrews started to receive more recognition towards the end of her life in the 1980s, her works have appreciated greatly in value in the past decade. Twenty years ago, a print of Speedway sold for as little as $500.
"When you look back at the history of printmaking in the 20th century, what the Grosvenor School was doing was really quite important and modern," he said.
"When you look at the group, probably the best of them all, you could argue, was Sybil Andrews."
Born in Bury St. Edmonds, England, in 1898, Andrews worked in non-artistic jobs throughout her entire life, often in what would have been considered non-traditional occupations for a woman. During the First World War, for example, she worked as a welder of airplane parts.
In 1922, when she was 24, Andrews met Cyril Power. At the time, he was almost 50 years old, had a wife and four children, and a career as a well-respected architect. In what can only be described as a massive midlife crisis, Power left his family, hooked up with Andrews and the two of them headed off to London to become artists.
While studying art in London, the two artists-in-training outlined their views on art in a paper they presented to staff and students.
"We are out to paint what we feel rather than what we see," they wrote. "We are 'out' now to search for and try and express the big things behind outward visible facts -- the Eternal Spiritual Reality behind material things that no camera can give . . . . We are out for Reality not realism."
Three years later, both Andrews and Power found jobs with the new Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Power was a lecturer, Andrews the school secretary.
At the Grosvenor the two of them met Claude Flight, who taught them how to make prints from linoleum blocks. Within three years, they were part of the First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery.
"[Andrews and Power's] working partnership produced some of the most arresting prints of the Thirties," according to the book Linocuts in the Machine Age by Stephen Coppel.
"Among their principal themes were the dynamism of the modern machine age, the rhythmic movement of the human figure, either at work or at sport, and the return to a medieval past."
By 1938, their partnership had run its course. Power, in his mid-60s, moved back to be with his family in Surrey; Andrews moved out of London to live in a family cottage in Norley Wood.
During the Second World War, Andrews met Walter Morgan while working in the shipyards in Southampton. In 1947, they left the United Kingdom and settled in Campbell River on Vancouver Island.
On the voyage from England, she lost several linocuts when they melted in the ship's hold. By 1951, she had re-established a studio but struggled to make ends meet as she taught art and the two of them worked as labourers and boatbuilders.
"I met people who knew her in Campbell River," Heffel said. "One friend said that 'Sybil was a real diamond in the rough.' "
In the mid-1970s, collectors and curators began rediscovering the work of the Grosvenor School in general and Andrews in particular. In June, 1978, Andy deVooght, a Vancouver art dealer, organized a successful exhibition of her work at his gallery. Within three years, she was making prints from her linocuts for dealers in Vancouver, New York and London.
In 1982, her reputation as a modernist printmaker was firmly established when Calgary's Glenbow Museum organized a travelling retrospective and published a catalogue of her work.
In her later years, Andrews created oil paintings and drawings that combined European modernism with West Coast subjects such as loggers, Douglas firs, and fishing boats.
She died in Victoria at age 94 in 1992.
Andrews's two most famous linocuts, Speedway and Racing, were exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006.
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