Claude flight biography

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He studied at Heatherley’s 1913-14 and from 1918 and exhibited at the RA in 1921, in Paris in 1922 and in London at the RBA from 1923 (ARBA 1923, RBA 1925), regularly at the Redfern Gallery and abroad. With the arrival of the First World War he departed for France where he became a captain in the Army Service Corps and soon a committed Francophile.

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Vortism, his work expressed dynamic rhythm through bold, simple forms. A member of the Seven and Five society in 1923, and of the Grubb Group in 1928, his work is represented in collections including the V&A.

Flight collaborated with Edith Lawrence, taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and wrote about and organized exhibitions on linocuts.

Before Flight - and for Japanese woodblock prints, and most European woodcut colour prints - a key block was almost always used: it provided structure and a clear outline for the main content of the print. A Hand-Book of Linoleum-Cut Colour Printing', London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Ltd, 1927 'The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing', London: B.T.

Batsford Ltd, 1934

Selected Collections

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham British Museum, London Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, Glasgow Mitchell Wolfson Jr Collection, The Wolfsonian Foundation, Miami Beach, Florida and Genoa, Italy Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Museum of Modern Art, New York National Art Gallery, Wellington National Gallery of Australia, Canberra New York Public Library, New York V&A Museum, London

He would also loudly declaim the poetry he wrote with drum beat as accompanying background.

Claude Flight 1881-1955

Linocut and woodcut artist; painter of figures, landscapes and townscapes in oils and watercolours; interior designer and illustrator. These were seminal in introducing the British art viewing public to Continental Modernism; but it was at this point, too, in 1912, that Claude Flight, aged thirty-one, decided to enroll as a student at Heatherley School of Fine Art, London.

Walter Claude Flight (1881-1955) was born in London to Dr.

Walter Flight FRS (1841-1885) a mineralogist and authority on meteorites, and his wife Katherine Fell (1841-1885). Many of these painters had spent time in Paris and had admired the cubist works of Picasso and Braque, and there are clear influences which can be traced from cubist artists to the Futurists.

Lawrence worked in various media - as a textile designer, for example - but she also worked with linoleum to make linocuts. But, in part encouraged by Lawrence, Claude Flight began to explore the possibilities of the linocut, and it is very much this medium for which Claude Flight is now associated.

The linocut, Claude Flight thought, was the perfect medium to express the new artistic concerns he first encountered at Heatherley’s - especially those as championed by Marinetti and the Italian Futurists.

But the Futurists took cubist preoccupations with abstracted blocks of colour, broke these down even further, and added elements suggestive of motion, dynamism and light (as for instance in Giocomo Balla’s watercolour ‘Study of the Materiality of Light and Speed’, 1913).

Inspired by both the Futurist’s concerns and their creativity of approach, Claude Flight argued that the linocut was the medium of choice because it had no yoke of associated tradition, certainly no strictures upon content; and whilst there were certain traditions of form – at least to the extent that the linocut is similar and sometimes derivative of the woodcut – they were traditions which, Claude Flight argued, his pupils need not follow.

He also suggested the abandonment of the ‘key-block’. A member of the Seven and Five society in 1923, and of the Grubb Group in 1928, his work is represented in collections including the V&A.... He studied at Heatherley’s 1913-14 and from 1918 and exhibited at the RA in 1921, in Paris in 1922 and in London at the RBA from 1923 (ARBA 1923, RBA 1925), regularly at the Redfern Gallery and abroad.

1935

Claude Flight: Breaking Waves, circa 1931

Claude Flight

Mother and Child, 1929
Linocut printed in 4 blocks (cobalt blue; yellow ochre; light brown; light red) on thin cream oriental laid tissue
20.6 x 18.9 cm (8 ⅛ x 7 ½ in)
Signed and numbered from the edition of 50 in pencil, centre and lower right

Provenance

Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, London

Literature

Stephen Coppel,Linocuts of the Machine Age, published by Scolar Press, 1995, CF 33, p.80

Exhibited

Redfern Gallery, London, 1929, no.22

Albany, London, 1931, no.6

Claude Flight

Claude Flight [1881-1955]

There was an extraordinary confluence of artistic trends in the years 1910-14, just before the First World War.

It was a period of transition from an established old order aesthetic to a new and largely imported one. His enthusiasm for the linocut was immense; and not the least of his achievements was his instruction and encouragement of such a host of other, now equally renowned artists – Cyril Power, Lill Tschudi, Sybil Andrews, Ethel Sparrows and Eveline Syme – each of whom have left a body of work which increases, yearly, to attract both acclaim and interest.

This cave would become his regular summer abode, and a place of invitation and retreat for his future art students.

The marriage with Clare James did not last and Claude Flight returned to London. The linocuts show his interest in depicting speed and movement. In form their works would shun the conventional in favour of new methods: Marinetti would write his poetry not in lines on the page, but rather as designs – wild ‘words-in-freedom’ he dubbed them.