Birgit Skiöld

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 the 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.

On returning from Paris, Skiöld set up a print making workshop in George Street Marylebone with a lithographic press and stones acquired from Vanessa Bell and previously used by Edward Ardizzone. Feeling the need to expand and collaborate, Skiöld set up the Print Workshop in the basement of Adrian and Corinne Heath's house in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia. The workshop's ethos was inspired by Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris and partly by Myfanwy Piper's comments on BBC Radio that London needed "an atelier where artists and professional engravers can inspire each other.”. The setup process began in 1956 and the presses were transferred to Charlotte Street in May 1958.

Birgit Skiöld (18 March 1923 – 18 May 1982) was a Swedish master printmaker and modernist artist who ran the highly successful Print Workshop in the basement of 28 Charlotte Street, London from 1958 to the late 1970s (now the Rebecca Hossack Gallery). She was a noted member of the London art scene during the time and her life is commemorated in an eponymous award for innovating printmaking.

Skiöld was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1923. She studied furniture design at the Tekniska Skolan (now Konstfack or University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Stockholm, and moved to London in 1948. Here she studied at the Anglo-French Art Centre, making connections with artists Francis Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi and curator/writer David Sylvester. She was inspired to try printmaking following a lithographic exhibition featuring Max Ernst and Oskar Kokoschka. She studied this with Henry Trivick and etching (with Richard Beer) at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). She completed her studies in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1954.