Sybil & Cyril
Cutting Through Time
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ISBN10: 1250872561
ISBN13: 9781250872562
Trade Paperback
416 Pages
$21.00
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 color, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time, they looked back to medieval myths and early music, to country ways that were disappearing from sight.
Jenny Uglow’s Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time 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, of shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.
Reviews
Praise for Sybil & Cyril
“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 élan—but with a critical addition: loss.” —Susan Tallman, The New York Review of Books
"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)
"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
"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)
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
1: WAR
When Sybil Andrews came home to Bury St Edmunds in late 1918 the town was not quite the same. But then neither was she. Bury felt small after Bristol, where she had been welding aircraft parts. The smell of malt and hops still...
About the author
Jenny Uglow
