By: Peter Milton

Medium: Resist Ground Etching & Engraving            
Year: 1998    

Points of Departure III: Twentieth Century Limited (1998) exemplifies Milton’s use of densely layered imagery to explore history, memory, and the passage of time. This is the third in Milton’s Points of Departure series, which uses the motif of train travel as a metaphor for moments of transition — both personal and historical. The title refers to the New York Central Railroad’s Twentieth Century Limited, the famed luxury train that symbolized modernity, speed, and sophistication in the early to mid-20th century.

In this print, Milton transforms the grand concourse of a glass-and-iron station into a vast stage where multiple temporalities unfold. Locomotives surge forward in plumes of steam, embodying the optimism and ambition of the industrial age. Below, the viewer glimpses figures at work amid train cars and fragments of culture: paintings, posters, and artifacts that evoke the accumulation of collective memory.