Liverpool Museums – Walker Art Gallery
18 April 2008 – 10 August 2008
Admission free
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This major exhibition captures the excitement of the steam train in art from the earliest days, through the boom years of Victorian railways to the end of the line in the 1960s.
Art in the Age of Steam is the most wide-ranging exhibition yet held to look at how artists responded to the extraordinary impact that steam trains had on landscape and society. It is one of the major highlights of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year.
Around 100 paintings, photographs, prints and drawings from some of the world’s greatest art collections come together in a dazzling display including:
- ‘The Railway’ by Edouard Manet (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
- ‘La Crau from Montmajour, with train’ by Van Gogh (British Museum, London) ‘Lordship Lane Station’ by Camille Pissarro (Courtauld Institute of Art, London)
- four paintings by Claude Monet – including ‘Gare Saint-Lazare’ (National Gallery, London)
- ‘Railroad Train’ by Edward Hopper (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.)
- ‘The Anxious Journey’ by Giorgio de Chirico (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
- photographs by Bill Brandt, Alfred Stieglitz and O Winston Link.
“Aboard these great machines, passengers travelled at faster speeds than ever before and notions of time and space were forever changed. 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.” Julian Treuherz, Co-Curator and former Keeper of Galleries at the Walker
Exhibition organised by the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. The exhibition will be staged at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 13 September 2008 to 18 January 2009.
Daily Telegraph review, 22 April, 2008
The coming of the railways transformed the way people lived – and provided glorious inspiration for artists, photographers and filmmakers. By Richard Dorment
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… changed man’s perception of the world and his place in it.
(complete article – many more pics!)