Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time

by Jenny Uglow

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374721770
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	149 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jenny Uglow is the author of many prizewinning biographies and cultural histories, including The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future and In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815. Her interest in text and image is explored in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Walter Crane, and in Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the 2018 Hawthornden Prize. She was the chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2014 to 2016. She lives in Canterbury and Cumbria.

Table of Contents

List of Plates xi

Beginnings 1

I Meeting

1 War 5

2 Sybil 16

3 Cyril 28

4 Angel Hill 41

II Setting Out

5 The Move 51

6 Heatherleys 54

7 London 60

8 Phoenix Place and Drypoints 70

9 Wembley 83

10 'The Art of To-day' 91

11 The Grosvenor School 99

12 The Arrival of Flight 111

13 Hay Lane and Brook Green 121

III Making

14 Colour 131

15 The First Show 140

16 Woolpit 146

17 Underground 157

18 Action 167

19 In the Body 175

20 Falling or Flying 181

21 'Our Ladye' 188

22 Forms of Faith 197

23 Saints and Matriarchs 204

24 'Our Show' 211

25 The Sporting Life 221

26 Pipes and Viols 231

27 'People and Freedom' 247

28 Out of London 252

29 Change All Around 265

IV Moving

30 Sea and Forest 277

31 Pipers 282

32 War Again 292

33 The Yard, and Walter 299

V Parting

34 Cyril 307

35 Sybil 315

36 Endings 323

Principal Exhibitions 333

Selected Bibliography 335

Notes 337

Acknowledgements 379

Index 383

Editorial Reviews

"Warm and inclusive . . . Jenny Uglow’s rich evocation of the past creates a lavish detailed background and illuminates the complex circumstances in which art is made. Her personal approach takes in the emotional lives of her subjects and their family connections." —Lindsay Duguid, The Times Literary Supplement

"A joy to read . . . Uglow is wonderful at conjuring up atmospheres — the poisonous gossip in Bury when the elopement became public, and the excitements of jazz-age London, with futurists, vorticists and surrealists spouting their manifestos, the new electric billboards lighting up Piccadilly Circus, packed proms at the Queen’s Hall, and the extending tentacles of the London Underground." —John Carey, The Times (UK)

"Marvellous . . . Few historians write better about pictures than Uglow, and her commentaries make you look and look again at bright colour plates that deliver little shocks." —Norma Clarke, Literary Review (UK)

From the Publisher

2022-09-29
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.

Kirkus Reviews