![]() ![]() Note: if you replace “railway” with “smart phone,” the last sentence will make boring ol’ art relevant to you! In other words, The Railway is meant to be the background and not the focus of modern life. The piece may be titled The Railway but the fact that it shows nothing more than a puff of smoke to indicate the train’s presence signifies how ingrained such industry had become. The piece is meant to represent a snapshot of modern Parisian life in the 1870s normal looking people, doing normal things, surrounded by technology that has become, well, normal. In other words, they missed Manet’s train of thought. They criticized the piece for lacking a cohesive composition, using mundane subject matter, and not depicting an actual train. It's just a subliminal resonance - now you see it, now you don't - as your eye, reading signs, making patterns, seeking meanings, plays across the indifferent row of bars.Édouard Manet paints a train in The Railway without even painting a train.Īpparently art critics in 1874, when this was exhibited at the Paris Salon, didn’t really understand one of the best things about art… it doesn’t have to be literal. Is not to insist on finding the eternal in the contemporary. There's a hint of classical statuary in the girl's raised arm and, in the line of railings, there's a hint of a classical colonnade. The picture has a cut-out, cartoonĬlarity that keeps slipping into uncertainty. The other sinks untraceably into the face. One side of the woman's chin is boldly defined. The back of the girl's head and neck stands out against the billowing steam. And the railings' hard, dark, grid, set against the bright dispersing steam, makes a point of maximum contrast - a keynote for a picture that is full of sharpĮdges and soft dissolves, of silhouettes and blurs. But these dense social signs are just facts, not clues. She's a mass of accessories: her lap filled with cuffs, book, dog, fan, her big round buttons, her carefully spread hair, her bonnet with itsįloral crest. The blankly simple design isolates the compact visual complexity of the young woman. Vertical shafts cut against the curves of the girl's raised arm, and her belling skirt, and the elegant tricorn gap that forms between the figures. It stresses the figures' opposing directions: the woman backed against it, facing keenly front the girl turned away, faceless, looking through it into the picture's depths. The whole scene is articulated on this iron grille. There's no train in view, but these iron railings cut through the scene like the railway line slices through the modern city. ![]() Like the railway itself, it's an intrusive fact. It divides foreground from background, forcing the figures up to the front. Its boldest, bluntest stroke of order is the flat-on screen of railings that runs across, going off-picture left and right and top. This street scene is composed, and into the sort of real life incident that - mixing accident with order - sticks in the memory. It's like a slice of uninterpreted actuality, a sight a passer-by might notice, and thenįorget. It offers no story, no clear relationship between its figures, no centre of interest. It's a glimpse, caught one clear morning in Paris,īy the railtracks outside the Gare Saint-Lazare.Įdouard Manet's The Railway acts casually. A young woman, sitting beside her, looks up from her book to peer out. A little girl, her back turned, stands staring at it. A train passes, leaving a cloud of steam in the air. ![]()
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