Lill Tschudi : the excitement of the Modern Linocut, 1930 – 1950

The Grosvenor School of Modern Art is relatively unknown private British Art School that existed between 1925 to 1940. Only in recent years has it been uncovered, explored and researched more thoroughly within the art historical canon. It might have been neglected because it focussed on an artistic technique, the linocut that has not received the most attention. As Jan Gordon (1882-1944) states in his article in the Observer on the 3rd June 1934 “The Lino-cut enjoys a lowly position as the poorest of poor relations in the social register of art”. The technique is seen as an educational tool rather than an expressive art form in itself and many of the artists that were proficient in using and working with linocut were women whose work also received little recognition.

The Gosvenor School was founded by the former principal of one of London’s oldest independent art schools the Heatherley School of Fine Art, also know as Heatherley’s, by Ian Mcnab (1890-1967), a wood cutter himself. In 1926 he appointed a former pupil from Heatherley’s Claude Flight (1881-1955) to teach the linoleum cut technique. Students who attended the school did not tend to stay long and took their acquired knowledge and experiences out into the world.
One of these pupils was the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi (1911-2004) who entered the Gosvenor School in London in December 1929 and left after just 6 months at the end of Mai 1930. Her teacher and mentor Claude Flight would remain a long-standing friend and supporter of her work until his death in 1955. Very little is known about her stay at the school. She describes her time there as “private lessons focusing on coloured linocuts under Claude Flight in London”¹. The Gosvenor School artists took their inspiration from everyday life and events such as funfairs and the circus, sports, concerts, theatres and music halls where people from a variety of economic, political, social and cultural classes would partake. Adopting the vantage point of spectators, the students would capture the velocity, modernity and strength of newly invented technological advancements, dynamism, joy and exuberance of modern life. And it is exactly the capturing of that dynamic that makes the style and technique of the linocut so recognisable and iconic.

Even though Tschudi would work for most of her life from her Swiss hometown of Schwanden in the canton of Glarus, her choice of motives and themes were broad and often unexpected. The two –colour print “Street Decoration”, 1937 captures the festivities commemorating the festivities of the Silver Jubilee of King George V, which she would have encountered at her visit to London in 1935. “Ships in Venice”, 1951 a four-colour linocut would have probable inspired by one of her frequent travels with her family around Europe. One of her most exhibited prints “Fixing the Wires”, 1932 got included in Flight’s seminal book on the technique of the linocut. “The art and craft of lino cutting and printing” was published in 1934 and included a double page spread illustrating the process of printing a multi coloured linocuts. She also experimented with designs for advertisements, children’s book illustrations, bookplates, birthday and wedding announcements, and motifs for postcards. Largely unknown in her native Switzerland, her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in Great Britain, the United States and Australia. A rather large number of her works are kept at the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

¹ Nachlass, SIK Zürich