Guy Malet1900 - 1973 |
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Guy Warre Malet was one of the most skilled printmakers to emerge from the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. A pupil and lifelong friend of Iain Macnab, Guy Malet is best known today for his highly accomplished wood engravings, primarily due to the extreme rarity of his linocuts. Guy Malet was one of the outstanding British exponents of white-line wood engraving between the two world wars. Malet had learned the techniques of wood engraving from Iain Macnab whilst at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1927. However, Guy Malet rapidly developed a distinctive style of his own, choosing viewpoints which allowed him to express all aspects of a given scene in one image, as though describing an entire small world all of its own. Aside from his well-known activities as a wood engraver, Guy Malet made a number of modernistic linocuts of the sort for which the Grosvenor Scool is now most famed. It was the artists who gathered at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art who first established the art of linocut in this country, developing the medium into a major and dramatic new art form. Their highly innovative work has now acquired an unique place in the history of British printmaking and has yet to be surpassed in its creative use of the linocut medium. However, the original linocuts of the highly talented printmaker Guy Malet are now amongst the most scarce of all Grosvenor School linocuts today. Although printed in editions of up to 50 impressions, the vast majority of Malet’s linocuts were destroyed by water, in a domestic flood. [more] |