CPE
1898 - 1992
Canadian
Fall of the Leaf
linocut in 5 colours, 1934
signed, titled and editioned 26/60
14 1/4 x 10 1/8 in, 36.2 x 25.7 cm
Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000 CAD
Sold for: $55,250
Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave
PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto
LITERATURE
Peter White, Sybil Andrews, Glenbow Museum, 1982, reproduced pages 42 and 57
Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, 1995, reproduced page 115, catalogue #SA 30
Clifford S. Ackley, editor, Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914 - 1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2008, reproduced page 172
Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, 2015, reproduced page 77
EXHIBITED
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Sybil Andrews, September 14 - October 22, 1982, same image, catalogue #30
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, same image, catalogue #100
The 1930s and the economic difficulties of the Depression brought about social awareness of the changes affecting industry and labour. In the mid-1930s, Sybil Andrews was depicting rural farm workers, whom she observed near her native Bury St. Edmunds in England. The roots of Andrews’s modernist approach were in the European movements of Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. Dynamic movement in modern life was a part of Futurism, and Andrews embraced this dynamism in her highly stylized linocuts, as in Fall of the Leaf, with its sweeping swirls of ploughed land, the curving rise of the hill and the spreading, fan-like trees. Dramatically patterned and strongly coloured, Fall of the Leaf makes an indelible impact. There is a kind of nobility in the farmer toiling with his team of horses, and a finely tuned aesthetic in the perfectly furrowed fields. Andrews depicts a scene roiling with energy, yet pulls all the elements of her image into a harmonic whole.
Stephen Coppel notes that early impressions are on buff oriental laid tissue, and later printings are on thickish oriental laid paper.
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