Shelburne Museum art exhibition traces impact of the railroad on American society

SHELBURNE - Tom Denenberg, director and chief executive officer of the Shelburne Museum, was having lunch with a few fellow museum directors a couple of years go, brainstorming ideas for exhibitions. Previously, they had done a quilt show together, swapping exhibitions, and a show based on hunting and fishing, featuring sportsmen/artists like Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

"We said, 'What's another broad-themed exhibition that pertains to all our communities?" Denenberg said. "We said, 'The railroad!'"

That was the genesis of "All Aboard, The Railroad in American Art, 1840-1955," now on exhibition in the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education's main gallery. Opening in late June, the show runs through Oct. 20, and features 40 "masterworks of American painting," according to Shelburne Museum. After the show ends at the Shelburne Museum it will go to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee and The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, Denenberg's collaborators in the exhibition.

Trains arrive on the American scene, bringing the modern economy with them

All Aboard is organized into four themes in the Pizzagalli Gallery, which has been painted a barn-like orange-red color for the exhibition: Smoke in the Wilderness; Industry and Urbanization; The Lonely Rail; and Passengers All. Denenberg had Shelburne staff put up boards on the wall with the name of the show that greets visitors to the gallery to remind them of a box car. It works.

"Initially, the way artists thought about trains is they put them as very small phenomenon in a landscape," Denenberg said, beginning with the Smoke in the Wilderness section of the show.

One of these early train paintings is by Charles Heyde, a 19th-century Vermont artist who contributed "Steam Train in North Williston," to the show, the only painting owned by Shelburne Museum. The train is relatively tiny in Heyde's landscape, with a steam engine and three cars trailing behind.

"The train is peeking its way into the scene," Deneberg said. "This is 1843, very early. The railroad comes to Williston just a couple of years before this. Overnight, there's a refrigerated warehouse, a way of moving beef out of Williston. The forest has been cut down and the train is coming through. We're on our way to sort of a modern economy."

Trains give us cities and invade Native American territory

Another painting in this section, "View of Donner Lake, California," by Albert Bierstadt, depicts a train on the infamous pass where the Donner Party, bound for Oregon in 1846, descended into cannabalism when they were stranded by snow drifts.

"So that's the earliest view, technology just poking into the wilderness landscape," Denenberg said of the Bierstadt painting. "But then, of course, we have to recognize the fact the technology basically reinvents the social topography of the United States. This gives us cities, Manifest Destiny, and displaces indigenous populations."

On the latter topic of Native Americans, one of the most evocative paintings in the wilderness section of the show is "Westward the Star of Empire," by Theodore Kaufmann. The painting depicts a nighttime scene on the high plains, with the distant headlight of an approaching train shining beneath a moonlit sky tinged with clouds. In the foreground, a group of Indians crawls toward the rails, with one reaching across the tracks to remove a rail that will send the approaching train crashing into the prairie.

Ashcan school of artists depict the soot and grit of trains in an urban setting

The next section of the show, Industry and Urbanization, brings us into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the so-called "ashcan" school of artists depicting "gritty scenes," Denenberg said. One such scene is William Robinson Leigh's "The Attempt to Fire the Pennsylvania Railroad Roundhouse in Pittsburgh, at Daybreak on Sunday, July 22, 1877."

A burning train at night, surrounded by an angry crowd of protestors, depicts the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the "first major workers' upheaval in American history," according to a book published by the museums for the show. Painted in striking greys and blacks, Denenberg said Leigh was anticipating his work being turned into an engraving.

"When you see artists painting in grey, what they're actually doing is painting this with the intention that it's going to get engraved and appear in a magazine," he said. "This is shorthand for the engraver. The contrast in the black and grey makes it easier for the guy doing the plate for the engraving."

A more comforting scene is John Sloan's "Six O'Clock, Winter," which features the New York subway on elevated tracks in Manhattan in the fading light of a winter evening, bustling crowds below in front of the lit windows of shops.

"He often painted Coney Island, distinctly New York scenes," Denenberg said of Sloan. "In this case, he's depicting the subway as something really exciting. It's the other side of (the) ashcan (school)."

Things get lonely and existential on the rails after World War II

The Lonely Rail is perhaps best exemplified by Edward Hopper's "Approaching a City," from 1946, which depicts the upper East Side of Manhattan where the rails descend underground into Grand Central Station. There are no trains and no people in the painting, just the tracks and sterile, surrounding buildings.

"In 1946, you begin to see a lot of that hermetic, existential imagery in all painting," Denenberg said. "I think it's the war anxieties about everything can change in a heartbeat."

Trains mix all strata of society together in one place, democratizing the rails

The final section of the exhibition, "Passengers All," puts people back in the picture, Denenberg said, as illustrated by Samuel Woolf's "The Under World," showing the democratization the train brings by depicting a car full of passengers.

"The train dramatically changed social interactions," Denenberg said. "Before the subway, rich people were in horse-drawn hansom cabs. Poor people walked. Once you have the subway, everyone is on the train together, wealthy people on the left, the messenger boy, an immigrant family on the right. It's an equalizer. A melting pot."

Denenberg said he and his fellow museum directors were able to get most of the paintings they wanted for the exhibition, securing works loaned from a range of museums across the country. Shipping costs were high, given the special handling these irreplaceable paintings are given.

"We cover the expenses and that is not cheap these days," Denenberg said. "They all travel in these crates which are hermetically sealed, waterproof, and ameliorate the temperature and humidity changes. The fact that we did it with other institutions allows us to do it. We couldn't afford to do it ourselves."

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.