Biography
The School Prints scheme was founded in 1945 by Brenda Rawnsley (1916-2007), an arts and education campaigner, whose mission was to get art into classrooms to educate and inspire children. Having been inspired by her late husband Derek (d. 1943) who had founded a small company, School Prints Ltd, which hired out Old Masters to schools with the aim of improving aesthetic standards, Rawnsley commissioned contemporary artists of the time to make a new series of prints that could be cheaply produced and made widely accessible. For a small subscription, schools were offered the opportunity to receive new prints to hang in the classroom.
The art historian and critic Herbert Read (19893-1968) helped Rawnsley to identify artists to contribute to the scheme and together they commissioned 24 original prints to be released to schools over a two-year period. The artists they worked with were given two conditions, firstly that the technique used must be lithography and secondly that only six colours could be used.There were two series of prints produced, the first in 1946 and the second in 1947. They featured well-known artists such as L. S. Lowry, John Nash, Julian Trevelyan, Hans Feibusch and Feliks Topolski, Russell Reeve and Barbara Jones, who had all achieved great popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.
The tone of the two series was distinctly nostalgic and traditional, incorporating scenes and objects recognisable to children such as the countryside, a ballet show and steam trains. Both series were warmly received by schools. Spurred on by this success Rawnsley turned her attention to Europe, taking a more daring approach and inviting artists who had become famous in the 1940s for their modern and abstract styles. In 1948 Picasso, Georges Braque, Leger and Matisse amongst others created boldly patterned prints but they proved too radical for their time and with schools withdrawing their subscriptions the scheme was forced to close.
Although the scheme had a shorter life than its supporters would have liked, it is an excellent example of the liberating potential of printmaking for artists to experiment and produce work which is widely accessible. Rawnsley's desire to introduce contemporary art by living artists to children alongside their reading, writing and arithmetic was a radical experiment, echoing the egalitarian ambitions of the welfare state in providing opportunities from an early age and the Arts Council in making art available to all. Exposure to art at a young age would be highly influential on the baby boomer generation who went on to shape contemporary culture in the 1960s.
In 2007 Pallant House Gallery, Chichester held an exhibition Art of the Classroom: School Prints 1946-49 which showed all 30 of the lithographs. In 2018 The Hepworth Wakefield launched a 5-year project, School Prints, commissioning artists including Rose Wylie, Peter Blake and Linder Sterling to produce prints which are then donated to local primary schools. In 2020, in partnership with the Turner Contemporary the scheme was extended to local Margate schools. The fourth edition of the project in 2021 featured six black artists to support the teaching of black histories. The artists were Hurvin Anderson, Alvaro Barrington, Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson and Yinka Shonibare.
