With their brilliant colours, swirling design and sharp, modern appeal, it’s hard to believe these artworks were created more than eight decades ago.

The Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico, where many of them were made using the then-innovative method of linocut, is long gone. So, too, are the artists themselves.

But such was their impact that Lymington’s St Barbe Museum is confident there will be a steady stream of visitors to a new exhibition featuring their work which starts today.

“This is the first major exhibition of this work to be held outside of London,” says Exhibitions Curator, Steve Marshall.

“And the main reason for doing it is the sheer quality of the prints.”

But there is also an intriguing local connection. For one of the artists, Sybil Andrews, lived locally for a time at Pipers, a thatched cottage in Norley Wood near Lymington. An image of the house appears on a card she produced, which is mentioned in the catalogues of the British Museum.

Andrews once worked as a welder but became the Grosvenor School secretary and because of its founder’s innovative approach was able to join lecturer Cyril Power in the classroom, learning to lino-cut.

She and Power embraced Futurism’s visual intensity and its subject matter: racing cars, motor buses, underground trains and motorcycles.

Around 1924 – perhaps encouraged by the Vorticist movement’s earlier Blast! declaration– Andrews and Power produced a manifesto which rejected Victorian painting and the Impressionists in favour of a radical modern style which reflected the contemporary world.

In their manifesto Power stressed the importance of rhythm, which he described as “the pulsating arrangement of lines, spaces and masses, colours, emphasis, etc. running through a design or work of art”, and design: “The arrangement of the component selected objects, co-ordinated, and sub-ordinated and interrelated into a coherent unity.” According to Steve Marshall the linocut proved to be an ideal medium for him to develop and express these ideas.

Power and Andrews parted in 1938, sparking her move to Pipers. During the war she returned to her earlier career, signing up as a welder, this time at the British Power Boat Company at Hythe. There she met Walter Morgan, and, says Steve Marshall, they married in 1943. In 1947, seeking a better life, they emigrated to Canada, taking up residence at Campbell River on Vancouver Island.

Sibyl Andrews died in 1992 and although much of her work is now in Canada the examples on show at the St Barbe Museum will, Steve Marshall believes, re-introduce the work that she and her fellow Grosvenor Artists produced to a whole new audience of admirers.

  • Prints of the Grosvenor School exhibition in partnership with Osborne Samuel is at the St Barbe Museum, Lymington, from July 26-September 20