Steam ahead
John Russell Taylor climbs aboard the Walker Art Gallery’s survey of railways in art.
John Russell Taylor, Sunday, 22nd June 2008
By the 20th century, too, the cinema has begun to intervene, and a reel of snippets takes us effortlessly from the sensational menace of Lumière’s train arriving in a station to the quaintness and nostalgia of Ealing’s The Titfield Thunderbolt – by way of the great poetic masterpiece Night Mail. And America contributes most of the few images of railway disaster, often, in self-protection perhaps, taking on a cartoony, almost comical quality – though one can never be quite sure that Thomas Hart Benton thought his images of classic rail crashes were quite so comical as others may find them.
The show ends with posters and photo-graphs, some of the latter as expressive as any painting in the show: just observe what Bill Brandt or André Kertész does with the subject. It does seem a little sad, though, that painters appear to have deserted rail, unless they are specialists in ‘railway art’. Terence Cuneo is all very well, but Turner or Monet, Boccioni or De Chirico he is not.
A regular writer on the arts, John Russell Taylor is the author of over 60 books.
‘Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway 1830-1960’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 April-10 August (+44 (0) 151 478 4199; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 13 September-18 January 2009. Catalogue by Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, ISBN 978030013788 (cloth), £35 (Yale).
1 Train in the Snow (The Locomotive) by Claude Monet (1840-1926), 1875. Oil on canvas, 59 x 78 cm. Musée Marmottan, Paris
2 The Anxious Journey by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), 1913. Oil on canvas, 74.3 x 106.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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