The Tube Staircase, Cyril Edward Power

Exhibition Label: "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard Initially trained as an architect, Power served in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, supervising the repair workshops near Dover, England. While he did not participate in combat, he did witness aerial dogfights over the English Channel, an experience that profoundly affected him. After the War, he left his architecture practice and pursued a career as an artist, teaching at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and producing color linocuts. The Tube Staircase is based on a close study of the actual spiral staircase at Russell Square Tube station. Power began sketching this staircase in 1926, and it resurfaces in sketches in 1927 that include notations on the relationship between light and shadow. In the print itself, Power used varying pressure in order to achieve a rhythmically graded effect, with the deep blue of the central stairwell fading into light blue at the edges of image. Power held that modern art must evoke the spirit of the time, with the underlying essence of the subject shown through significant shapes, colors, rhythms or patterns. The idea of rhythm was especially important; Power defined it as “the pulsating arrangement of lines, spaces, masses, colors, emphasis, etc., running through a design or work of Art, which carries the design along and makes it live.” A decade earlier, Filippo Marinetti, the founder and leader of Futurism, a form occasionally described as Cubism in motion, had announced a new art of the machine age, one that expressed speed, dynamism, and energy. While Power did not have any direct connection with the Italian Futurists, he did know and admire the works of C.W. Nevinson, one of the few British artists who adopted Futurism. The clear modernity of this print’s subject matter also connects Power’s work with that of the English Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth, whose woodcuts Power knew.