The Sunday Times: May 4, 2008
Review: Waldemar Januszczak
It sometimes wanders off track, but this artist’s-eye view of the railway era provides plenty of nostalgic pleasures
HANDOUT PICTURE ART IN THE AGE OF STEAM Hot Shot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia by O Winston Link (1956).
Trains don’t seem to offer us much any more. The plane is our vessel of choice for the bigger getaway, and it holds the edge, too - despite the continuing efforts of Ryanair - when it comes to a sense of the miraculous. Up in the sky, looking out at earth’s horizon, it is as clear as it ever was that what we are doing ought to be impossible. The transport we are most in love with, though, is, of course, the car, because it cuts us off from the rest of the world and allows us to zoom about among our fellows in a mechanised bubble. Like the iPod, the internet and the anonymous letter, the car is essentially a solitary pleasure. It allows us to retire to our own kingdom and express ourselves from a position of glassed-in safety. That’s why quiet people become beasts of the road inside their cars, and why dull-looking newsagent types are the keenest kerb-crawlers.
So, the poor old train has lost most of its selling points. In journey times, it competes with the plane only on the grimmest commuter distances. Boats cling to a finer air of rarity. And trains no longer allow you to indulge successfully in any tempting intimacy with strangers, because of the modern preference for the open-plan compartment, so they’ve lost their magic. Which is why an exhibition in Liverpool, Art in the Age of Steam, is such a sad pleasure. In various ways, it reminds us of the lost potency of the train.
The thing about trains is that they were the first unmistakably modern contraptions to escape from the city. Early trains were devilish things - clanking, boiling, hissing, rattling, whistling - thundering across the landscape and frightening nature with their scary belches and horrible stinks. So, the show begins on a note of genuine trepidation. David Cox, a tremulous rural watercolourist at the best of times, watches a night train roaring across Yorkshire in 1849, showering sparks and spewing smoke, and he sees a mechanical Satan threatening the safety of his beloved England. Judging by the enormous gloom of the sky, and the crazy fear of the horses galloping across the foreground, the end of the world is nigh, rather than the 4.15.
There was much about the first trains that was diabolical. Not just the fire and brimstone of the engines, but those pitch-black tunnels into which they disappeared. What the hell was down there? Even the way trains wound their way through the landscape was snakey. Adolph Menzel watched one puffing out of Berlin in 1847 and noticed how its relentless smoking had stained the surrounding countryside the colour of excrement, and how the brutal thrust of its progress through nature had about it the air of a rape. Trains took a lot of getting used to. Only when artists began switching their attention from the outside of the train to the inside - looking at what went on among the passengers - did they get properly interested in puffers.
The exhibition looks at how artists responded to the impact that steam trains had on European landscape and society.
William Powell Frith - The Railway Station
Oil on canvas, Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham.
William Powell Frith's 1862 view of Paddington Station shows all social orders
Frith’s famous view of the crowd at Paddington station is a prime example of the genre, a multi-part soap opera unfolding across the largest platform in the world, as a frantic scrum of the train-travelling classes - including the thief whom the police have handcuffed on the right - prepares to board a 4-2-2 broad-gauge engine of the Iron Duke class. (If that kind of information presses your horn, then there is plenty here for you.) A much greater painting, though, than Frith’s railway station is Honoré Daumier’s Third-Class Carriage, a gloomy peep inside the cheapest wagon, where three generations of the poor - a grandmother, her daughter and a baby - sit on the hardest seats and wait. Train travel has become a metaphor for human suffering.
The show devotes most of its attention to the 19th century, when the train’s history was at its most pioneering.
We begin in Britain, but soon branch out to Europe, America and as far afield as Japan, where British engineers completed the first railway line in 1872, between Tokyo and Yokohama. Most people, however, will be drawn to this show to see what the impressionists made of the train. After all, trains began popping up all over the French landscape at roughly the same time as impressionists did.
The greatest painting in the show is unquestionably Manet’s view of a small girl and her nanny looking down through some railings onto the Gare St-Lazare. The woman in the picture is Victorine Meurent, the same model who posed for Manet’s scandalously naked Olympia, as well as the brazen nude in Déjeuner sur l’herbe, so we can be sure this is one of those important Manet paintings that seeks to encapsulate the plight of the modern woman. In this instance, the railings of the railway bridge have become the bars of a cage. The railway beyond them represents escape, freedom, choice - but the little girl and her nanny are trapped on the wrong side of the platform.
The Railway (The Gare Saint-Lazare) by Edouard Manet (1873 – French).
Oil on canvas. Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W Havemeyer.
As the train’s symbolism keeps changing, so art’s interest in it adapts accordingly. What should be the highlight of the show, Monet’s momentous battle with the different shades of smoke inside St-Lazare station, turns out to be disappointing. He painted several versions of the subject, but only the least exciting one has arrived here. Van Gogh is represented by a drawing. And, back at the start of the journey, we are welcomed aboard by a video about Turner’s crucial Rain, Steam and Speed, rather than the painting itself. The sweet old Walker, I fear, lacks the clout to ensure the best loans.
Many artists had studios near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, which appears in numerous Impressionist works.
Claude Monet - Gare Saint-Lazare
Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.
Perversely, just as the train’s role in art increases in importance, the show itself decreases in stature. The section dealing with the train’s identity as a futuristic icon of progress and speed is particularly disappointing. The organisers were unable to borrow Boccioni’s futurist master-work from MoMA, the huge triptych set in a railway station called States of Mind. And even the mad love affair with the train of the postrevolutionary Russians is poorly evoked. For the surrealists, trains became handy locations for distressingly predictable sexual fantasies, usually involving a dramatic plunge into a tunnel. Yet De Chirico, the master of sexually charged railway innuendo, is another who is weakly represented. And the two huge Delvaux paintings of naked girls in ridiculous railway situations are no substitute for a good trainy Magritte.
'The Iron Age', Paul Delvaux
Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Oostende
This potentially fascinating account is just about to peter out dismally when the Americans arrive to save the day. In the show’s final image, that great photographer of steam trains, O Winston Link, takes us to a drive-in movie in the 1950s as a speeding smoker thunders past the fence. The great express is so close, you can almost touch it. Everyone at the cinema must surely have heard it. But the couples in the cars are too busy watching a movie about a plane to notice it. In a show packed with railway metaphors, this surely, is the saddest.
Art in the Age of Steam, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until Aug 10
See also:
All aboard for the modern age
The Observer: May 4, 2008
Laura Cumming
Art in the Age of Steam, 1830-1960
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; until 10 August
The coming of the railways transformed Victorian Britain and inspired powerful new art, as this fine show in Liverpool reveals
The modern world began in 1830, it is said, when the first passenger train screamed through the land, 'burrowing among the dwellings of men, flashing out into the meadows with a shriek and a roar!' recalled Dickens in Dombey and Son. The sight was so astonishing some people thought these machines were supernatural illusions. Others actually believed they grew bigger as they got closer. As for hazarding a trip, you could be crushed to death, tipped from a bridge or burned alive in the wooden carriages, victim of an oil lamp mishap. Just to watch the landscape flashing by at 50mph would damage your eyesight.
Artists were wary at first, depicting trains as black forces raping the landscape. Wordsworth was the loudest dissenter. But just as passengers fell in love with these alien creatures, so painters began to see the wild beauty of steam and speed, of rushing motion, of arrival and departure and of all the human stories that happened in between.
Travelling on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway - S G Hughes after Isaac Shaw
Aquatint, hand-coloured, The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Telford.
The world's first passenger train ran from Liverpool to Manchester, so it is apt that one of the highlights of Liverpool's Year of Culture should be Art in the Age of Steam. It is a terrific show, both in terms of art, with masterpieces by Monet, Manet, Daumier and (amazingly) van Gogh, among many others, but also in the tale it unfolds.
Opening a route to Manchester meant boring through vast hillsides. The light at the end of the tunnel has never been better represented than in Thomas Bury's watercolours of Olive Mount, last tunnel before Lime Street, where engineers fumble through a hellish gloom lit only by the distant exit.
And it meant scoring the ground with miles and miles of track receding in dizzying perspectives in English etchings to rival Piranesi; perspectives that would become sinister in Edward Hopper's Midwest and surreal in the cityscapes of de Chirico.
The train is a dark bolt, an explosion, a speeding leviathan. Steam flares and dissolves, the only evidence of a machine that is gone before you know it. In Munich, steam draws a grey pall over the station windows. In Paris, it swarms in dabs in Monet's Gare St Lazare. Steam is cloud brought conveniently to earth; no wonder the Impressionists loved it.
Train in the Snow (The Locomotive) - Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris
The carriage is literally that at the start: a pony trap drawn on locomotive trestles. Then come first, second and third class and Victorian artists begin painting the social distance between compartments; the upholstered parlour of first in which the young lady, on a long journey to Perth, meets her future husband; the fetid prison on wheels of Daumier's Third Class.
The Travelling Companions - Augustus Egg
Oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, presented by The Feeney Charitable Trust, 1956.
English art leads from the off with Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, but the most influential railway painting of the 19th century was William Powell Frith's The Railway Station (1862). All human life is readying for departure on the 5.04pm from Paddington - the new bride, the old soldier, the father emigrating to find work in America, the rozzers catching up with the criminal.
Twenty thousand Londoners paid to see this picture in its first six months, before it became a mass-market engraving that nearly outsold Millais's Bubbles. Abroad, painters restaged it for local markets from Berlin to Sacramento, with cowboys instead of clerks. Trains, like art, crisscross the globe; some of the strongest works here show the railroads pushing out across the prairies of America. Morning of a New Day, as it's sarcastically titled, has a fiery-eyed monster ravaging the heartlands of the watching Indians. The scene is in all respects painted from their viewpoint.
American painters, proud of the progress their young country was making, were initially more willing than Europeans to include railways in their landscapes.
The Lackawanna Valley - George Inness
Oil on canvas, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of Mrs Huttleston Rogers.
Trains take artists where they have never been before, from snowbound Siberia to the height of the Sierra Nevada. They give the Russian Constructivists an image - a blueprint - for fast-moving progress. They symbolise the caffeine rush of the 20th century for Futurists.
But the single clinching image of this new sense of time and motion is James Tissot's Gentleman in a Railway Carriage, in which a prosperous, fur-collared gent holds fast to a strap as the train rushes on, the view through the window a blur. On his knee is an open timetable, in his hand a fob watch and he flashes the viewer a knowing look as if we were also checking progress. Halfway between portrait and archetype, this is the very essence, as a contemporary critic put it, 'of Nineteenth-Century Man'.
Tissot is a strange case, French born but long resident in London and an exception that proves the rule with his narrative bias. For the other story of this show is about international painting and the different routes it takes in the late 19th century. English painters are increasingly anecdotal, literary, moralistic. American painters show the measureless landscapes through which trains move like tiny insects. French painters regard the railways as aspects of modernity, signs of the times. To prove the point, the Walker has flown in from America two crucial masterpieces of French art.
During the 20th century, the railway became an increasingly fascinating subject for artists from photographers to Futurist painters.
Auguste Hippolyte Collard - Roundhouse for Thirty-Two Locomotives, at Nevers, on the Bourbonnais Railway
Albumen print, J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
One is Gustave Caillebotte's extraordinarily daring On the Pont de l'Europe, in which fully half of the painting is empty of anything but the bridge's steel struts and the other half shows the back of three men, one of whom is walking fast out of the picture. What they are looking at is the railway below, a scene we can't see but which turns this into a scene of modern life, abruptly skimmed from the streets and stained blue with smog.
The other is Manet's marvellously mysterious Gare Saint-Lazare, also known as The Railway - the child and the woman bound in their famous triangle, one looking into another world, the other looking our way with that inquiring eye, noticing that she's noticed. The future is all there in the parade of railings that spans the picture, coming between the figures and the pure white steam beyond. It is an abstract dimension, the very signal of modernity.
See also:
Steam and art
Rail Future:
No 1 Tunnel by John Cooke Bourne
from the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust
A rare opportunity exists for rail supporters to see a collection of 100 works of art inspired by the railway.
The Liverpool exhibition includes paintings, drawings, prints and photographs and “captures the excitement of the steam train in art from the earliest days”, to the 1960s.
Art in the Age of Steam “celebrates the power and impact of the railway on artists” and is a highlight of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year.
There are works by Frith, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh and Hopper, great names from both Europe and North America.
The four-month long free-entry exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery is the only European showing of the exhibition, which is organised in collaboration with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
It includes:
The Railway by Edouard Manet, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
La Crau from Montmajour, with train by Van Gogh from the British Museum, London.
Lordship Lane Station by Camille Pissarro from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Four paintings by Claude Monet, including Gare Saint-Lazare from the National Gallery, London.
Railroad Train by Edward Hopper from the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
The Anxious Journey by Giorgio de Chirico from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photographs by Bill Brandt, Alfred Stieglitz and O Winston Link.
Curator Julian Treuherz commented: “Aboard these great machines, passengers travelled at faster speeds than ever before and notions of time and space were forever changed.”
Mr Treuherz, co-curator and former keeper of galleries at the Walker Art Gallery added: “Nothing has been done on this scale before – visitors are transported on an exhilarating journey in the company of some of the world’s great artists.”
The exhibition opened in April and continues until Sunday 10 August 2008. It goes to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 13 September 2008 to 18 January 2009.
The Walker is open from 10am to 5pm every day and is a short walk from Liverpool Lime Street main line station.
It is also possible to use Liverpool Lime Street low level, Moorfields station or Liverpool Central.
More info: liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/steam
See also:
Art in the Age of Steam: ticket to a brave new world
Telegraph: 22/04/2008
By Richard Dorment
The coming of the railways transformed the way people lived - and provided glorious inspiration for artists, photographers and filmmakers.
The modern world came into being with a shriek and a rattle and a puff of dirty smoke on the day in 1830 when the first passenger train pulled out of Liverpool on its way to Manchester. The steam engine, which enabled travel by train, changed man's perception of the world and his place in it.
Images from America and the rest of the world demonstrate that the railway was a global phenomenon and show how the technology travelled.
O Winston Link - Uncoupling on the Fly, Blue Ridge Grade, Virginia
Gelatin silver print, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, Loan, with intent to give from David and Susan Goode.
A quarter of a century after that first journey by rail, Britain was served by a railway system that enabled men and women to move from North to South in hours, not days. This new conception of distance led in turn to a stronger sense of a national identity. And, with the introduction of timetables, people became conscious of a wholly modern anxiety - the need to be on time. No longer was it enough to start a journey more or less when you intended to set out. With railway time, six o'clock meant six o'clock, not two minutes past.
Art in the Age of Steam at the Walker Art Gallery (until Aug 10) looks at the way artists responded to these upheavals from the 1830s to the mid-1950s.
Initially, artists considered trains eyesores. The earliest images of the railways are, therefore, documentary prints and drawings showing not just the engine and carriages, but deep gorges cut through hills, vertiginous viaducts, vaulted tunnels and giant ventilating shafts.
It was a remarkable artist named John Cooke Bourne who lovingly recorded these awe-inspiring sights in lithographs, watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings that speak more eloquently than words of the Victorian romance with the marvels of engineering.
But the first important artist to see poetry and beauty in a speeding train was JMW Turner, whose Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844) evokes in nearly impressionistic brushstrokes the blur of a steam engine seen from head-on as it thunders across a railway bridge spitting fire and steam.
Contained within this one image are all the themes with which this show is concerned - the power of the machine itself, the devastation it wreaks on landscape, the new architecture (the railway bridge) that comes with the new invention, and the way railways render old forms of transportation (a boat and road bridge) out-of-date.
Finally, with the addition of a tiny detail, Turner indicates that the new technology has already altered man's conception of time, for at the side of the train he shows one of nature's swiftest creatures, a hare, pathetically trying to outrace the a roaring monster of iron and steel. The picture is too fragile to be lent, but it is so crucial that the show starts with a film of it hanging in the National Gallery.
It wasn't just the countryside that was changed for ever with the coming of rail travel. In Dombey and Son, Dickens describes the huge excavations and building projects that transformed the area in North London behind Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross, and this is precisely the scene that so fascinated artist George Scharf in his drawing of the Birmingham Railroad in Progress in the Hampstead Road.
On the whole, artists who first described the railways saw them as embodiments of progress, power, beauty and hope - overlooking the pollution, urban desolation and human degradation they bought in their wake. Trains also ushered in the age of mass migration as the British artist Frank Holl shows in his touching study of a forlorn group of poor women whose husbands and sons have just boarded the train to Liverpool, where boats will take them to the New World.
By the 1850s, Victorian artists often used trains and railway stations as settings for narrative pictures, whether it's the two sisters enveloped in grey silk crinolines who share a stifling private carriage in Augustus Egg's ravishing Travelling Companions, or Abraham Solomon's paired scenes showing the meeting of young lovers in First Class, and the tearful parting of a poor mother from her sailor son in Second Class. Great art? Hardly, but gripping social commentary: we see how quick the railway companies were to minimise contact between rich and poor.
In his panoramic view of Paddington Station of 1862, William Powell Frith shows all social orders - middle class and working class, British and foreign, policeman and thieves - chaotically mixing together on the station platform. In a moment or two, they will all board the train and social hierarchies will be restored by the separation of the travellers according to class and wealth.
As a setting for all the best stories, trains fascinated artists and filmmakers right up to Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes and North by Northwest.
In France the representation of trains and railway stations has much more to do with the representation of modern life than it does with storytelling or searching social commentary. Manet's The Railway (1873) isn't really about transportation but about the strange sight of steam rising behind a well-dressed Parisienne sitting in front of iron railings above the station, while her little girl looks down on the trains below.
Here, and in Gustave Caillebotte's On the Pont de L'Europe, anonymous inhabitants of a modern city look as though they are crushed or imprisoned by impersonal iron structures. In his Gare Saint-Lazare, Monet wreathes utilitarian architecture in clouds of blue steam, while, at the turn of the century, Camille Pissarro is completely matter- of-fact in his representation of now familiar suburban trains puffing through Bedford Park and Dulwich.
But each country is different. In America, artists rarely showed trains close up. What interested George Innes in his views of the Delaware Water Gap and the Lackawanna Valley is the sight of distant trains snaking through pristine wilderness - evidence of man's presence in the New World and of his noble aspiration to bring civilisation to an empty land.
If Americans saw beauty in the railroads, that is in part because they actually were more beautiful than in Europe. With virtually limitless land and labour, Americans didn't have to blast through hillsides or build trestle bridges to cross the continent. Train tracks were curved, meandering up or around mountains without destroying the land, as we see in Albert Bierstadt's majestic view of a little train tootling through the Sierra Nevada.
In the 20th century, surrealists used trains as symbols of internal anxiety and Futurists saw in them hope for a brave new world.
Speeding Train - Ivo Pannaggi
Oil on canvas, Cassa di Risparmio, Macerata.
The show closes on perfect note, with a photo by O Winston Link, Hot Shot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia. It shows a young couple at a drive-in cinema, cuddling in their convertible. At the very moment the image of a large jet fills the screen, a steam train thunders past. The date, 1956, is important because, with the coming of the diesel engine and the jet, the age of steam drew to a close.
Most thematic shows tend to be patchy because the images are chosen for the subject, not the quality of the art. This one, organised by Julian Treuherz and Ian Kennedy, is different because in addition to telling a terrific story, the paintings, prints and photographs are for the most part exceptional, whether they are by famous artists or unknowns.
# Art in the Age of Steam at the Walker Art Gallery (until Aug 10)
