Author(s): Jenny Uglow

Art | Biography and Memoir | Architecture | Photography | Artist Monographs | Design

In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four year old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years.

Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts, streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight.

Cyril & Sybil traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

Review:

"How this art came to be, and how it came to be forgotten, is one part of the story Uglow tells. The other part concerns a relationship that stubbornly refuses discovery . . . If it is a romance, it is a romance without bodies . . . It is a very Sybil-and-Cyril image--the energy, the curvature, the elan--but with a critical addition: loss." --Susan Tallman, The New York Review of Books

"Warm and inclusive . . . Jenny Uglow's rich evocation of the past creates a lavish detailed background and illuminates the complex circumstances in which art is made. Her personal approach takes in the emotional lives of her subjects and their family connections." --Lindsay Duguid, The Times Literary Supplement

"A joy to read . . . Uglow is wonderful at conjuring up atmospheres -- the poisonous gossip in Bury when the elopement became public, and the excitements of jazz-age London, with futurists, vorticists and surrealists spouting their manifestos, the new electric billboards lighting up Piccadilly Circus, packed proms at the Queen's Hall, and the extending tentacles of the London Underground." --John Carey, The Times (UK)

"Marvellous . . . Few historians write better about pictures than Uglow, and her commentaries make you look and look again at bright colour plates that deliver little shocks." --Norma Clarke, Literary Review (UK)

Author Biography: Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria. A former Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, she is the author of prize-winning biographies and cultural histories, from The Lunar Men: the Friends who made the Future (2002) to In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 (2014). Her interest in text and image is explored in Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition (2008), and in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Walter Crane and most recently in Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the Hawthornden Prize in 2018. She was created an OBE in 2008, and was Chair of the Royal Society of Literature 2014-2016. She lives in Canterbury and Borrowdale, Cumbria.