‘Jenny Uglow’s excellent, vividly illustrated new book tells the story of two of the most talented practitioners of the art, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews.’ Spectator
In 1922, Cyril Edward Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to live and work with Sybil Andrews, who was twenty-six years his junior. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they also looked back to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. In Sybil & Cyril, Jenny Uglow traces their struggles and triumphs, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island, and bringing to life their world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction.
Cyril Edward Power’s work ‘The Eight’ appears on the cover of Slightly Foxed Issue 18.
‘Uglow had to create “a ragged collage of two lives” from sketchbooks, appointment diaries, and scrapbooks. She has succeeded brilliantly, tracing their remarkable careers, from “oddly matched watercolourists in a country town to innovatory print-makers at the heart of the London scene”.’ Guardian
‘Interwar Britain fizzes to life in an enchanting biography of two linocut artists – and their (allegedly) platonic obsession with each other.’ The Telegraph
