Trains & Artists

Trains & Artists

I love old train stations. Pennsylvania Station in New York and 30th
Street Station in Philadelphia are like grand cathedrals, temples built
to worship at the altar of travel and style. They were built at a time
when society valued the commodity of travel without having to own your
own vehicle. Many fine artists have been influenced, effected and
inspired by trains and stations.

When the famous La Gare Saint-Lazare train station was built in Paris
in the late 1800s, it caused quite a sensation. Not only was it big,
bold, and very modern for the day, it represented a new era in
transportation and flexibility of life style. Many people came just to
look at the station and to admire the steam engine with it's billowing
smoke when it arrived and departed, including the artist Claude Monet.
(1840-1926)

Monet is perhaps best known for his depictions of cathedral facades,
his haystacks series or his late Waterlilies paintings. Monet's
paintings were very radical at the time and he was also one to paint
that modern era. Monet is the grandaddy of plein aire painting
(meaning, out in the fresh air) as well as one of the founders of the
Impressionist movement. In 1877, Monet lived near La Gare Saint-Lazare
in Paris and produced a series of eleven paintings on site. He clearly
loved the large space produced in the train shed as well as the
atmospheric steam that seem to create large cumulus clouds indoors.
This is what Emile Zola had to say about Monet's La Gare Saint-Lazare,
"You can hear the trains rumbling in, see the smoke billow up under the
huge roofs....That is where painting is today....Our artists have to
find the poetry in train stations, the way their fathers found the
poetry in forests and rivers"

When people saw this painting they were shocked by the loose, brushy
style. The main idea of Impressionism is to use brush strokes and color
to represent not photo-realism or a carefully considered rendering of a
subject. The idea was to paint to present an impression of a moment,
place, time of day, and quality of light and color as directly as
possible with daubs of paint.

Another great artist of the day who was attracted to the Parisian
railyard was Edouard Manet. (1832-1883) He was commissioned by the rail
authority to create a series of their celebrated train station but he
was soon released from this duty when it became apparent that Manet was
much more interested in representing people around the railway and not
the trains or station itself. If you look carefully behind the woman
and girl you will see the horizontal lines that lead into La Gare
Saint-Lazare. Manet is considered a Realist. That is, his work has a
more studied or lingering look to it. He spends hours in his studio
working on his paintings using models who will hold a pose for long
periods of time.

This painting actually created a stir when first exhibited at the Salon
in Paris in 1874. The new impressionist style made viewers think the
paintings were unfinished, rough, or sloppy.

Franz Kline (1910-1962) is an American born painter and was also
inspired by trains. He grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and said
that the sound and motion of moving trains inspired his large brushy
paintings that are considered both abstract and expressionistic. You
won't see photorealistic images of trains in his work though he did
enlarge sections of his drawings with a projector.

Perhaps the big bold strokes of black on white represent the sound or
impression of standing closely to moving trains and feeling their bold
rush as they go by. That's what I have always thought anyway.

I am grateful for these artists who have recorded their impressions of
train and railways. It gives me a better sense of how to imagine myself
at the dawn of train travel; the excitement, the possibilities, the
power of travel given by this new and powerful technology. Monet,
Manet & Franz Kline understood the importance of this new way of
travel and have painted their impressions for all of us to enjoy and
ponder.
-Mary Rayme