All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art 1840-1955

FOREWORD

The railroad transformed modern existence in

rise of this extraordinary technology ushered in a

nineteenth-century America (and around the

second Industrial Revolution, facilitated restless

world) in much the same way that the digital age

western expansionism, gave rise to the flawed

dramatically altered life just before and probably

ideology of Manifest Destiny, sparked the first

long after the turn of the last millennium. Not unlike

spectacular wealth creation in America and the

the capacity of email, the Internet, social media,

inequality that accompanied it, and contributed

and smartphones to instantly move and receive

to the steady destruction of indigenous ways of

information of almost any kind, there was simply

life. By the dawn of the Gilded Age, railroads had

nothing like the power of railroads for transporting

fundamentally transformed any number of related

people and products between growing metropolitan

industries, from coal mining to steel production, and

centers in the eastern United States and ever

introduced innovations never before seen in banking,

westward across the continent. By the 1850s,

finance, modern warfare, farming and ranching,

American railways had effectively stitched together

tourism, urban planning, and, unmistakably, if

a still relatively new nation in a manner its citizens

inadvertently, in the fine art of oil painting.

could scarcely have imagined just thirty years earlier as they watched steamboats on the Hudson and Ohio Rivers or canal boats towed by mules.

Just as the digital revolution has in the present day, the railroad largely reinvented the American experiment in the nineteenth century.

The history of the railroads in the United States is also the history of many other things. The unfettered

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Detail from Cat. X (p. X)

fore word

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KEV�N SHARP

Cat. 21 Hugo Robus (American, 1885–1964) Train in Motion, ca. 1920 oil on canvas mounted on fiberglass, 26 ¼ x 32 ⅛ inches Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Robus, Jr., 1978.153.2

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3 / T H E L O N E LY R A � L

Fig. 17 Winold Reiss (American, born in Germany, 1886-1953) Langston Hughes, ca. 1925 pastel on illustration board National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss, © Estate of Winold Reiss

grabbing, union-busting, and politician-bribing power in the late nineteenth century.3 Moreover, by mid-decade people were leaving rural lives in the South in massive numbers for the hope of greater opportunity and less discrimination in the industrial North. Many of those travelers arrived in northern cities by train, as the Chicago Defender noted in its national edition in May 1925: “The great migration is on. Every train pulling into stations of northern cities unloads migrants fresh from the cotton fields, foundries, and lumber camps of the South.”4 Even as American railways could feel themselves contracting, any given train roaring by could still seem formidable to a bystander. Hugo Robus’s brilliant abstract painting Train in Motion (cat. 21) of about different. One generation saw explosive growth

1920 captured the railroad as the industry may have

and corporate might, while the next witnessed an

wanted to see itself―a still-vital form and the very

industry that was in a form of stasis, under siege, and

symbol of speed and efficiency. Robus placed a string

seemingly in decline.

of rolling boxcars diagonally across the lower register

The American railway system in 1920 was as

of the composition, the closer cars in red and those

large as it would ever be, covering more than a

further away in shadowy blue. Abstracted bridges

quarter of a million miles of track in the United

and trestles and trusses fill the upper reaches of

States alone, employing a million and a half

the painting while shafts of light pour through the

people, and reaching virtually every corner of

architecture and cast broad shadows upon it. In

the country with service of some kind. But that

its complete absence of a human presence, the

mammoth scale was mostly residue of an earlier

painting speaks to the loneliness Americans would

and more productive era, and the system would

eventually come to associate with the railroads, even

grow no larger. Increasingly, in the 1920s, ordinary

if only obliquely. But Robus’s emphasis on muscle and

Americans began to identify with the freight and

locomotion, and his embrace of Cubist abstraction

passenger trains that rattled through town, their

in Train in Motion, largely ignores the nostalgia for the

sights and sounds frequent, abundantly familiar,

railways that many if not most were coming to feel.5

and suddenly, it seemed, steeped more in nostalgia

It may have been the poet Langston Hughes

than in an expansive future.2 That familiarity helped

(fig. 17) who was the first to grasp and capitalize

establish associations, feelings, and memories in

artistically on the shifting American perception of

ways the transportation juggernaut could never

the railroads. He first gained notice for a poem he

have expected to occur at the height of its land-

called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” written in 1918

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J U L � E P � EROT T �

Cat. 14 John Sloan (American, 1871–1951) The City from Greenwich Village, 1922 oil on canvas, 26 x 33 ¾ in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970.1.1

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2 / � N D U S T R Y A N D U R B A N � Z AT � O N

Cat. 15 Leon Kroll (American, 1884–1974) Terminal Yards, 1912–13 oil on canvas, 46 x 52 ⅛ in.

Flint Institute of Arts Gift of Mrs. Arthur Jerome Eddy, 1931.4

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T h o m as D e n e nb e r g

Cat. 32 Samuel J. Woo lf (American, 1880–1948) The Under World, ca. 1909–10 oil on canvas, 22 ½ x 30 ½ in.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Funds provided by a private Richmond foundation, 95.101 SHELBURNE AND DIXON ONLY

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4 / Pass e n g e r s A ll

Cat. 33 Walter Pach (American, 1883–1958) The Subway, 1919 oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in.

Saint Louis Art Museum Gift of John and Susan Horseman, in honor of Melissa Wolfe, Curator of American Art, 106:2019

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