Railway and Arts: Railways and carriages

dijous, 4 de juliol del 2013

Railways and carriages

The British National Railway Museum in York offered, from 22th July to 30th September 2012, the opportunity to enjoy an exhibition of Japanese art that reflected the introduction of railways in this country. The collection of illustrations on wood proceeded from Modern Transportation Museum in Japan that is based in Osaka.

One of the draws by Kunimasa IV is entitled Train and pedestrians in Takanawa (1873). In it, a train follows its path by the sea while pedestrians, carriages and rickshaws drive on the road and the bridge over the road.

This image bears a strong thematic and visual similarity with some American and European contemporary works. One of them is the 1871 drawing of J. C. Russell entitled On The Road To Bedford Range: A Consignment by The 8:00 a.m. Train preserved in the Nova Scotia Museum of Cultural History (USA).

The other one is the Bineleau's French engraving Le Chemin de Fer Paris-Rouen (1845), that confronts the new railway and the old road in the crossing point.

The common theme of the three artists is obvious: the contrast between the slow, winding and heavy traditional means of transport and the straight, uniform, inexorable and rapid rail. In Japanese and American illustrations, train and carriage enter in competition, a struggle that inevitably win the new environment; otherwise, in the French illustration, the carriage moves defeated, can not compete in capacity with the iron horse, seems resigned to a change of era.

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Railway and Arts

Since its inception, the railroad has kept the interest of the artists. John C. Bourne represented in his prints and drawings the enormous engineering work of the first British lines and painters such as Gustave Caillebotte or Dario Regoyos captured in their canvas European landscape transformed by the new method of transportation. The novelists, from Tolstoy to Zola, from Dickens to Oller, used the railroad as a setting in their works. The poets, such as William Wordsworth and Melchor de Palau, glossed the changes that the railroad caused in lives and property. The cinema, from its first frames, took it as a stage and protagonist. The music has found in the rattle of the train the basis for their workers popular songs, the patterns of Winton Marsalis jazz and the basis for the symphonic works by Arthur Honegger. The illustration and poster have produced memorable works to promote certain routes. This tradition has not been broken, survives in graphic novels, movies, sculptures and railway themed poster and, more recently, in electronic art and video games. All that is the subject of this blog.