The railway painting4/19/2023 ![]() ![]() 1 These are both informative and charming. Turning into the first gallery produces another dramatic shift, this time from the brilliant orange of the entrance to a small grey-walled space filled with early documentary engravings and drawings of railway history. Here, the visitor is greeted with an immense orange mural of a locomotive hurtling down a track, echoing the slope of floor, and conveying an immediate awareness of the sheer size of a train engine. Because sloping corridors link the above ground pavilions, there is a natural sense of moving downhill as you walk towards the special exhibitions galleries that terminate the progression of spaces. The entrance to Art in the Age of Steam takes full advantage of its location halfway down the hillside site (fig. Radiating a luminous glow in any weather condition, the Bloch Building transforms the campus of the Nelson-Atkins museum into a dramatically elegant contemporary space. ![]() Brilliant natural light floods the space without the damaging effects of unfiltered sunlight. These spaces are distinctively lit from a series of clerestories at the top of the above ground sections of the structure between the doubled glass planking that comprises the wall are ultra-violet light filters and light-diffusing insulation panels. Designed by Steven Holl Architects as five interconnected structures that step down the steep hill to the east of the original museum, the Bloch Building houses temporary exhibition galleries as well as educational rooms and galleries for the permanent collection. It must be noted too that Art in the Age of Steam was the first major exhibition in the new Bloch Building, the165,000 square foot addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (figs. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Telford, England. Hughes, after Isaac Shaw, Travelling on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1833. It alerts us to both the dominance of the railway in nineteenth and twentieth century images, and to the fact that it has been overlooked as a theme-perhaps because it has become so commonplace that we no longer perceive it as an independent entity.įig. The breadth of this theme is central to the exhibition. Throughout the exhibition the curators present the theme of the railway in all its complex-and often complicated-forms as an object of wonder and despair as a tool of empire building, racism, and glorious industrial innovation and as a symbolic image that is simultaneously dangerous, boring, and nostalgic. The goal of Art in the Age of Steam was specifically “to show the response of the best artists to the railway, first as a new and revolutionary form of transport, then to the multifarious ways in which the railways transformed everyday life, both physically and psychologically.” (12) This exploration takes the viewer from the earliest decades of purely documentary imagery to the post-World War II era when airplanes began to replace trains as the primary means of long-distance travel. Turner’s legendary Rain, Steam and Speed, however, there are far fewer analyses of the visual artist’s aesthetic response to the railway. The crucial role of the railway in the industrial revolution can hardly be overestimated, and there is no shortage of scholarly discussion about the effect of passenger rail travel on Impressionist imagery, for example. The startling reality is that curators Ian Kennedy (European Painting and Sculpture at The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art) and Julian Treuherz (former Keeper of Art Galleries, National Museums Liverpool) have created the first exhibition and catalogue that present this singularly important aspect of nineteenth and twentieth-century life clearly, coherently, and with art-historical thoroughness. Surely, someone somewhere has already presented this subject. ![]() The fact that this exhibition is the first major international exploration of visual artists’ response to the railway seems almost unbelievable. “Oops!” That would be an appropriate caption for the image of the art historian, with hand slapped to forehead, strolling into Art in the Age of Steam, Europe, American and the Railway, 1830-1960 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. ISBN: 978-8-8 Support NCAW: Buy this book at New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008Ģ88 pages illus: 210 color and 48 b/w checklist of exhibition timeline bibliography indexed. Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, with contributions by Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Please note: selected figures are viewable by clicking on the titles of the art works which are hyperlinked.Īll photographs by the author unless otherwise indicated.Īrt in the Age of Steam, Europe, American and the Railway, 1830-1960 ![]()
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