Local Hero

I’m rather wary of the view that austerity makes for good art, after all DCMS don’t need an excuse to slash and burn the cultural coffers. That said one very good thing has come out of the gaping hole in Museums Sheffield’s budget after a disastrous funding decision at the start of the year, and that is The Power of Print: Leonard Beaumont Rediscovered. With less money for high profile touring shows and expensive loans, the curators have had to look to the city’s collection for new exhibitions, allowing curator Sian Brown to realise a long-held ambition to display the work of local boy made good Leonard Beaumont.

Not much is known about this multi-talented figure except that he was born in Sheffield in 1891 and started his career at the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, meanwhile attended evening classes at Sheffield School of Art. From these amateur roots he started making prints in the 1920s, teaching himself the requisite skills and even commissioning a local steel works to make his own domestic printing press. This continued into the 30s until his professional life took him to London working as a designer for the film company United Artists, the General Post Office and finally Sainsbury’s where he was responsible for some of their most distinctive packaging. It seems that this move put an end to the printmaking and it was only in the 1980s that Beaumont’s artworks were made public when he gifted them to Sheffield Art Galleries (as they then were). The gift prompted a retrospective at the Mappin Art Gallery (now Weston Park Museum) in 1983 but since then his work hasn’t been seen. Until now that is.

The exhibition is spread over two rooms with the first showing Beaumont’s earliest work in drypoint, a technique he used in tandem with the more complex process of etching.  These monochromatic, impressively detailed works feature a combination of industrial interiors, the odd Sheffield view and, most commonly, alpine scenes from his holidays in Switzerland – an upscale version of the picture postcard. These precise prints rarely feature people however, one etching shows an almost romanticised image of a Sheffield grinder at his wheel while a less posed drypoint depicts two mountaineers resting on a peak, all bulging calf muscles and Baden-Powell hats.

While these works are impressive in their meticulous draftsmanship, especially for a self-taught hobbyist, the most arresting images are the linocuts in the next room. Bold dynamic lines and fabulous colours animate everything from cavorting nymphs to Bavarian yodellers in these stunning prints. Their distinct modernist style is reminiscent of the Grosvenor School where Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews were producing their celebrated Vorticist-influenced works, some of which were displayed in Restless Times at the Millennium Gallery a few years ago. Although Beaumont was a contemporary of these artists he is not known to have had any direct association with them.  Displaying the same vibrancy as these more well-known works, Beaumont’s glorious images seem to dance off the walls, their repetitive lines, exuberant curves and contrasting colours expressing the vigour of the pre-war age. The vivid joy of living displayed in them is almost poignant given that the Second World War was just around the corner. Perhaps modernism is perpetually fashionable but I looked at these linocuts with half an eye as to where I would hang them in my house.

There’s also a tantalising glimpse of Beaumont the designer in a cartoonish watercolour about Christmas posting for the GPO and a Christmas card referencing the Spanish Civil War. This taster makes you wish for another room full of his design work. That said the existing display is a fascinating account of an unsung cultural hero whose work expresses something of the Sheffield aesthetic, including industry – in both production and subject matter -, a fondness for mountains and hills, and a knife-sharp sense of style.

The Power of Print: Leonard Beaumont Rediscovered opens tomorrow at Museums Sheffield: Graves Gallery and runs until 14 September 2013.