Speed

Claude Flight

ca. 1922; printed 1929 · Color linocut · Drawings and Prints

Speed captures the bustling energy and movement of both buses and pedestrians on Regent Street, a busy commercial hub in London’s West End. One double-decker bus has the lettering "SPEE" on its side, which, combined with the curving forms of the buildings and roads, conveys the sensation of speed. This depiction of contemporary urban activity evokes comments by the Italian Futurists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ("London itself is a Futurist City! Look at those brilliant-hued motor-’buses, these enormous, glaring posters") and Gino Severini ("London is a city where movement and order reign. . . . Motor-omnibuses passing and re-passing rapidly in the crowded streets covered with letters—red, green, white—are far more beautiful than the canvases of Leonardo or Titian, and closer, too, to Nature"), artists whose work Flight knew and whom he may have met.

Artist

Claude Flight

Date

ca. 1922; printed 1929

Medium

Color linocut

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Purchase, Leslie and Johanna Garfield Gift, Lila Acheson Wallace, Charles and Jessie Price, and David T Schiff Gifts, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, Dolores Valvidia Hurlburt Bequest, Peco Foundation and Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts, and funds from various donors, 2019