Lill Tschudi valuation
Grosvenor School linocut artist of dancers, cyclists and workers cut into pure movement.
Lill Tschudi was born at Schwanden in Switzerland in 1911 and came to London at nineteen to study under Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, the centre of the British colour linocut movement.
What a work by Lill Tschudi is worth
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Bio
Lill Tschudi was born at Schwanden in Switzerland in 1911 and came to London at nineteen to study under Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, the centre of the British colour linocut movement. She stayed only a few terms but became one of its finest practitioners, later studying in Paris with Andre Lhote, Gino Severini and Fernand Leger. The linocuts are built from a small number of blocks in flat overlapping colour, and the subject is almost always movement — rugby players, cyclists, dancers, telephone wires, sailors and factory workers, reduced to rhythmic repeating shapes. She worked into old age and died in 2004.
This is a print market and a strong one, driven by the sustained international demand for Grosvenor School linocuts. Editions were tiny — frequently fifty, often fewer, and rarely printed in full — so genuine scarcity underpins prices. Impressions are printed by hand on thin Japanese papers and vary considerably; registration, colour freshness and the absence of light damage or foxing are what separate one from another. Later restrikes and posthumous printings exist and must be distinguished. Signature, title and numbering are in pencil.
Bresslern-Roth, Paris and the 300 linocuts
Tschudi decided to become a printmaker after seeing an exhibition of linocuts by the Austrian artist Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, and studied at the Grosvenor School from 1929 to 1930. She lived in Paris from 1931 to 1933, and from 1935 lived mainly in Switzerland with her sister's family, while continuing to exhibit in London with Claude Flight and his circle.
She made more than 300 linocuts in her career. Her prints were in British Prints from the Machine Age, shown by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008, and the Graphische Sammlung of ETH Zurich gave her an exhibition in 2021, with a monograph edited by Alexandra Barcal and Marcel Just.
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