Published by Faber & Faber, 2022, hardcover, illustrated, 400 pages, index, condition: new.
From one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of 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 colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. Cyril & Sybil 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, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.
Jennifer Uglow is a biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
I've loved the Lino prints of Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power for a long time and have always been bowled over by the economy of line and the sense of speed and fluidity they were able to convey in their work. Uglow's book is a great balance between the work and their lives and not just the things that influenced their work but the way they created it. Their work ethic was amazing and thanks to the vast body of work they left behind them, there is much to go on here, despite the fact that they destroyed the papers and letters they sent to each other. This doesn't ever feel thin or rushed. I appreciate that the book was about their work and life together but the last chapter on Sybil's life after Cyril's death was the only part of the book I wished there was more of, as her life in Canada and later fame sound fascinating, but this really should be an entire book in itself I suspect. Good pictures and good descriptions of key works for which there are no pictures, making them easy to visualise. I know I will refer back to this book and think about it when I look at the works again. A great perspective.
