Designer Desire: Claude Flight

Montage of Claude Flight linocut designs

London-born Walter Claude Flight (1881-1955) was a pioneer in the linocut art discipline. Before becoming an artist, Flight trained as an engineer, became a librarian, kept bees and was a farmer.

His linocuts are full of colour and movement and illustrate the time’s preoccupation with speed, progress, modernism and the machine age.

Over his career, he produced over 60 limited-edition prints that, on the odd occasion, come up for sale at auction. Examples have sold at Sotherby’s for $20,000+ USD. Goldmark sell official reprints for £250.00. His work is in the permanent collections of the V&A, the British Museum and the National Gallery of Australia.

A couple of his books, namely Lino-cuts, Lino Cutting and Printing, Christmas and Other Feasts and Festivals and Animal, Vegetable or Mineral (shown in the montage above) all command huge prices on second-hand book seller websites.

From 1926, Claude Flight taught a linoleum cut class at the London Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico, London. His students included Sybil Andrews, Dorrit Black, Eileen Mayo, Cyril Power, Ethel Spowers, Eveline Symes, Lill Tschudi and his partner Edith Lawrence (whom he’d met a few years earlier). This talented lino cut collective became known as The Grosvenor School.

Portrait of Claude Flightcredit

Additional image credits:
Goldmark