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Birgit Skiöld (1923 - 1983) was a Swedish printmaker and modernist artist who ran the highly successful Print Workshop in the basement of 28 Charlotte Street, now the Rebecca Hossack Gallery.

Life
Birgit Skiöld was born in Stockholm 1923. She arrived in London in 1948, studying at the Anglo-French Art Centre, where she met artists Francis Bacon, Edouardo Paolozzi and curator/writer David Sylvester. An exhibition of French lithographs featuring Max Ernst and Oscar Kokoshka sparked an interest in printmaking, which led her to Regent Street Polytechnic where she studied lithography with Henry Trivick and etching with Richard Beer.

Further studies in Paris followed and by 1954 she was living at 76 Charlotte Street, and had set up her first studio in a basement in George Street, Marylebone, having acquired the lithographic press and stones that belonged to Vanessa Bell (of Omega Workshop, Fitzroy Square fame) and which had been used by artist and illustrator, Edward Ardizzone. Here she and fellow students made prints and Skiöld identified the need for open access printmaking facilities in England.

Skiöld was in part inspired by the example of English Artist Stanley William Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 studio which had reopened in Paris in 1950, after a period in New York during and after the war. Hayter had collaborated with Picasso, Miró and Kandinsky in Paris, and Pollock and Rothko in New York. Painter and printmaker John Piper’s wife Myfanwy had said in a BBC Radio review that what is needed “is an atelier where artists and professional engravers can inspire each other.”

Robert Erskine, who ran the St George’s Gallery at 7 Cork Street, and who was to be influential in encouraging Stanley Jones to set up the Curwen Press, another operation with Fitzrovia connections through the Curwen Gallery in Windmill Street, was a generous supporter of Skiöld’s vision. They were to organise several exhibitions of Print Workshop artists together over the coming years.

Against this background of increasing interest in the medium of print, Skiöld found a home for the Workshop in the basement of the artist Adrian Heath’s house in Charlotte Street. Heath and his wife Corinne were benevolent landlords, and only charged a modest rent, with Heath making use of the facilities himself.

The presses were moved in May 1958, and the Print Workshop provided a professional and friendly place where artists found a busy centre for avant-garde ideas, and a haven of print culture presided over by a “very special doyenne, who ran a fairly strict regime on a shoe-string budget”, at a time when it was unusual for a woman to be running her own establishment.

Work
Skiöld was a pioneer in championing the status of printmaking as art, and experimenting with techniques including embossing, mixed media, Xerox printing and collage. She was also an early exponent of the livre d’artiste, working on occasion with texts by other famous Fitzrovia residents, past and present.

Her first artist’s book incorporated texts by the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was born at No.38 Charlotte Street and later lived at No.50, and at 37 Fitzroy Square.

A shared love of Japan led her to produce three bookworks with poet and travel writer James Kirkup. The first, Scenes from Sesshu was published in 1977, the same year that the charge of blasphemous libel was resurrected and used for he first time in 50 years to prosecute Gay News for publishing the Kirkup poem, The love that dares to speak its name. Kirkup was a well known fixture in the pubs and clubs of Fitzrovia, and was renting a room above a shoe shop at 77A Tottenham Court Road from 1948.

The Print Workshop
The Print Workshop was a spawning ground for talented printmakers and many who worked there under Skiöld’s watchful eye went on to open their own studios, famously American artist Kathan Brown who set up the internationally famous Crown Point Press in San Francisco, in 1962. Students at The Royal College of Art, Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, amongst others, benefitted from her printmaking lectures, and she taught workshops in universities in the USA, Sweden and Japan.

Skiöld’s husband, Peter Bird, director of Bradford City Art Galleries and Museums, has described the studio as having “a lively and industrious atmosphere, when it was at its best, and a little chaotic on a bad day.

There was no house style or tendency, just diversity, individuality and excellence. One might have encountered Tom Philips working in one corner, or Maurice Payne proofing for David Hockney, maybe an American or Japanese artist over in London to work for a few months, or Skiöld herself developing one of here ideas.” The impressive list of artists who either used the studio, or whose work was editioned there reads like a survey of mid twentieth century art: Michael Ayrton, Boyd & Evans, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Tessay Jaray, Edouardo Paolozzi, Dieter Roth, William Tillyer, Joe Tilson, William Tucker.

Skiöld’s highly social personality, and international affiliations, had made The Print Workshop at 28 Charlotte Street an art world hub, as Skiöld described her domain: “Not a business, not a college, not a gallery, simply an idea which has worked.”