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Summary
Summary
Honorable Mention, 1988, in the category of Excellence in Design and Production, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Of all the innovations of the industrial revolution, it was the railroad that took strongest hold on the collective American imagination. These essays on paintings, prints, and photographs explore the wealth of railroad imagery in American art - from Thomas Cole's pastoral landscapes to the industrial muscle of works by Bellows, Luks, Marsh, and Sloan, and evocations of the frontier in photographs by Andrew Joseph Russell and William Henry Jackson. The Railroad in American Arthad its origins in a 1981 exhibit at the Wellesley College Museum on "The Railroad in the America Landscape: 1850-1950." The show attracted much attention because of the remarkable quality and diversity of the images collected, but it also raised numerous questions that are taken up in this more thorough exploration of the intriguing connections between art, technology, and American culture. Susan Danly lays the ground with a survey of the uses of railroad imagery in American art over the last 150 years. Seven shorter essays then focus on specific images or themes. Kenneth W Maddox looks at the confrontation between economic development and the vanishing wilderness of Native Americans in Asher B. Durand's Progress. Nicolai Cikovksy, Jr., clarifies the place that George Inness's popular but enigmatic Lackawanna Valley had in his career. Susan Danly uses Andrew Joseph Russell's photographic album The Great West Illustrated to show the impact that railroad patronage had on artists' aesthetic concerns. Leo Marx concludes the book with a historical exploration of the theme of the railroad-in-the landscape. In an iconological analysis, he shows how railroad imagery was used to represent a variety of deep social and cultural concerns on the part of American artists. James F. O'Gorman examines the sources for H. H. Richardson's "man-made mountain" designed for the Ames family (Boston backers of the Union Pacific Railroad) in Wyoming. Dominic Riciotti follows the railroad to the city - the urban train, subway, and elevated - as a force for ever-changing technology, while Susan Fillin-Yeh explores the dual nature of Charles Sheeler's fascinating and powerful painting Rolling Power, which functioned both as a work of fine art and as a piece of commercial advertising. Turning to the railroad imagery in Edward Hopper's work, Gail Levin shows how public image and personal psyche can become deeply intermingled in an artist's work. Susan Danly is Associate Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library. Leo Marx is William R. Kenan Professor of American Cultural History at MIT.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
In nine absorbing, lucid essays, eight art and cultural historians assess American attitudes toward technology as expressed in artwork representing or relating to the railroad train. The introductory and concluding essays offer ideological and iconological overviews, respectively, of more than a hundred years of train-inspired imagery. The seven intervening articles focus on particular works or groups of work, e.g., Durand's painting Progress, A. J. Russell's photo-album The Great West Illustrated, and Hopper's railway imagery. Fundamental to the discussion overall is the perception of opposition between technological expansion and the preservation of pristine nature. Nineteenth-century artists often sought to reconcile this opposition; those of this century subsumed it in more personal and aesthetic concerns. American art enthusiasts, students of our cultural history, and reflective train nuts will all be enriched by this handsome topical album. Essays individually annotated. Index. RO. 760'.04496251 Railroads in art / Art, American / Art, Modern-19th century-U.S. / Art, Modern-20th century-U.S. [CIP] 86-21037
Choice Review
Although railroads are but one of many images found in American art, these perceptive essays convincingly show that the railroad was a powerful symbol of "progress" in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that the images are a valuable index to the experiences and attitudes of Americans in relation to technological change. Danly's introduction surveys the range of images, from the first appearance of a barely discernable train in a Thomas Cole landscape through the photographs of the great post-Civil War era of railroad building to urban images by Sloan, Burchfield, and others to contemporary photorealism. Next are seven essays, rich in insights, by knowledgeable scholars on individual works, or groups of works, suh as Durand's 1853 Progress; Inness's c. 1856-57 Lackawanna Valley, both suggesting awareness of changes to come; Russell's photos recording the triumphant 1869 transcontinental connection; and Hopper's frequent depictions which, although cooly objective, seem to express the waiting, longing, and melancholy created by the disjunctions of modern transportation. The final essay by Leo Marx further probes the deep-rooted cultural and social concerns expressed in or suggested by these images. A distinguished, thought-provoking volume, well written and well illustrated. -J. J. Poesch, Tulane University
