Sybil & Cyril: cutting through time
Description
From Jenny Uglow, one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of a love affair and a dynamic artistic partnership between the wars. In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts—streamlined, full of movement and brilliant color, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time, they looked back to medieval myths and early music, to country ways that were disappearing from sight.Jenny Uglow’s Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of futurists, surrealists, and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, of shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.
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Kirkus Book Review
A dual biography of two British artists who created a powerful modernist aesthetic. From 1922 to 1942, Cyril Power (1872-1951) and Sybil Andrews (1898-1992) worked together as artists, garnering acclaim for their strikingly dramatic linocuts. Award-winning biographer and historian Uglow creates a palpable sense of their nourishing relationship, the "energetic restlessness" of their artistic circles, and the changing world to which they responded. Viscerally attuned to "the dizzying mood and unease of the late 1920s and early 1930s," at the same time, writes the author, they "looked back, to a dream of a pre-industrial life." Though holding different religious convictions--Power was Catholic; Andrews was drawn to Christian Science--"both thought intensely about faith." They met in Bury, England, where Power, married and the father of four, was an architect and teacher; Andrews, teaching at a local school, was an aspiring artist. Power, when he chanced upon her drawing, offered advice. In 1922, Andrews left Bury for art school in London. Soon, Power abandoned his family to follow her. For the next 20 years, they worked together, traveled together, shared a studio, and exhibited their work together. They also played period instruments in their own musical ensemble. Friends saw them as a couple, but Andrews insisted later that their relationship was entirely platonic. Whatever intimacy they may have shared, they spurred one another's creativity. Both took up etching--London churches, colleges of Oxford and Cambridge--hoping to sell prints to academics, former students, and tourists. Both saw linocutting as an exciting technique that leant itself to the dynamism, action, and "radical simplicity" they sought to convey. "Lino itself," Uglow writes, "was a modern, 'democratic' material, machine-made, efficient, cheap." A generous selection of images reveals their aesthetic preoccupations: Power's with railways and stations, light and shadow; Sybil's swirling patterns often depicted physical labor, "part of her rebellion against prettiness." A chronology of their exhibitions testifies to their renown. A vivid, engaging portrait of a productive artistic partnership. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.