PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Peter White, Sybil Andrews, Glenbow Museum, 1982, reproduced page 60
Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, 1995, reproduced pages 36 and 117, catalogue #SA 40
Clifford S. Ackley, Rhythms of Modern Life, British Prints 1914 - 1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2008, essay by Thomas E. Rassieur, pages 115 and 116, reproduced page 122
Gordon Samuel and Nicola Penny, The Cutting Edge of Modernity, Osborne Samuel, 2013, reproduced page 13
Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, 2015, reproduced page 87

EXHIBITED
Redfern Gallery, London, French and English Colour Prints, November 29 - December 30, 1939, same image, catalogue #162
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Sybil Andrews, 1982, same image, catalogue #29
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Rhythms of Modern Life, British Prints 1914 - 1939, January 3 - June 1, 2008, traveling to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, same image, catalogue #64
Osborne Samuel, London, The Cutting Edge of Modernity: An Exhibition of Grosvenor School Linocuts, same image, April 11 - May 11, 2013

Thomas Rassieur writes, “Movement – coordinated, directed, and energetic – made sport an ideal arena for exercising the modernist impulse of the Grosvenor School linocutters.” Sybil Andrews, one of the principal Grosvenor School artists, produced an important group of prints based on sport, including the dynamic Football. English football, or soccer, was so popular in the 1930s that The Football League had grown to 88 teams. Building rhythm through repetition of form in movement was a key concept for the Grosvenor School, and in Football, Andrews’s two players are similar in body type, uniform and posture. Rassieur comments on this fine linocut, “Andrews’s players perform a choreographed duet. Their sturdily hewn legs are parallel, their shoulders, arms, and heads nearly mirrored. The round ball is almost lost among the angular forms that appear to project from their surroundings of blank paper.” In contrast to our time, what is concentrated on in Football is not the individual star athlete, but a more egalitarian approach to the very essence of sport itself, the act of skilled competition between well-matched players.

Early impressions of this print are on buff oriental laid tissue; later printings are on thickish oriental laid paper.

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