Lill Tschudi

The Excitement of the Modern Linocut 1930–1950

Vibrant metropolis and placid Switzerland: Lill Tschudi's modernist linocuts
Edited by Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, Alexandra Barcal, and Marcel Just

Hardcover
180 pages, 151 color and 8 b/w illustrations
23 x 28.5 cm
ISBN 978-3-03942-057-5
1st edition, 2021
Text English and German
Concept and design: Vieceli & Cremers
fonts in use: Dada Grotesk, Optimo, DeValance

Lill Tschudi (1911–2004), daughter of a merchant family from the rural Swiss canton of Glarus, moved to London in 1929–30 to be educated at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. She flourished in the vibrant imperial capital of the inter-war years and soon gained wide recognition for her bold and often colorful modernist linocuts. She continued her artistic formation during several stays in the equally throbbing Paris in 1930 and 1931. In the Anglo-Saxon world her reputation as an accomplished printmaker close to the Modernist British Printmaking movement has lasted, and her works continue to fetch good prices at auctions in Britain and Australia. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art holds some 120 of her prints in its permanent collection. Yet in her native Switzerland, she has largely fallen into oblivion.

This book, published to coincide with an exhibition of Lill Tschudi’s work at Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich in winter 2021–22, is the first major monograph on this outstanding artist. It features previously unpublished material from Tschudi’s archive and from private collections, shedding new light on her life and work, as well as a wide-ranging selection of her colorful linocuts that demonstrates her uniquely dynamic, colorful pictorial world.  The essays explore and analyze her choice of topics and artistic proces and investigate what made her art so popular abroad.

With contributions by Alexandra Barcal, Jennifer Farrell, Marcel Just, and Anna Lehninger. Foreword by Linda Schädler.

Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's collection of prints and drawings. It is one of the largest collections in this field in Switzerland, containing some 160,000 high-quality artworks on paper from the fifteenth century to the present day.

Alexandra Barcal is deputy head and conservator of 20th and 21st-century art at Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich.
Marcel Just is a Zurich-based freelance writer and curator.