Claude Flight 'Speed' Linocut Exhibition Poster

An open-top red omnibus swings down Regent Street, its side lettered SPEED, while the curved facades of the street bend with it and a policeman on point duty holds back the traffic. Claude Flight cut this colour linocut in about 1922, and it became the image he chose to introduce the medium to the public: the frontispiece to his 1927 handbook Lino-cuts: A Hand-book of Linoleum-cut Colour Printing.

Flight (1881–1955) came to art late, after spells as an engineer, a librarian, a farmer and a bee-keeper, and studied at Heatherley's in London from 1913. He first used linoleum in 1919 and promoted it from then on as a democratic medium, cheap to buy and quick to cut, that could put original prints within reach of anyone. Speed is one of his early attempts to make the material carry the pace of a modern city. Every form is drawn in motion, the bus tilting into its turn, the pedestrians reduced to strokes, the building line pulled into a single curve. He knew the Italian Futurists' work, and Marinetti had already declared that London's bright motor-buses made it a Futurist city.

From 1926 to 1930 Flight taught the linocut class at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico, where Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Lill Tschudi and Eileen Mayo learned the method. In July 1929 he organised the First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery on Old Bond Street, an event that ran annually until 1937 and led to purchases by the British Museum and the V&A. The Grosvenor School prints of the 1930s, with their spiralling escalators and racing cyclists, grow directly out of this image of a bus on Regent Street.

Our poster imagines a spring 1959 survey of Flight's London prints at the Talbot Harlheigh Gallery on New Bond Street, four years after his death and at a time when the Grosvenor School prints had largely fallen from view. The typography is set in a light inscriptional roman on an off-white ground, the restrained house style of a Mayfair dealer's announcement card at the end of the 1950s, with the print given the whole upper half of the sheet and the exhibition details kept to two lines at top and bottom.