Painting the Saint-Lazare railway station in 1872 Paris was rather an audacious challenge at a time when art was traditionally and conventionally limited to portraits, still-lifes or landscapes.
Industrial life was not considered as an attractive theme by most painters but for Edouard Manet, who had just moved to an apartment overlooking the yet unachieved railway station, that new scenery was an ideal subject worth experimenting.
A few years after causing a scandal with his « Olympia » described as indecent by art critics, he thus painted « the Railway » with his model Victorine Meurent facing the viewer for the last time in his works while a young girl by her side and seen from the back is watching an ongoing train, moving like a ghost through fumes, her hand holding one of the railings against which Victorine is seated.
One can perceive in this painting that the young girl is entirely captivated by this train about to enter the station like a steaming dragon. But this is secondary to the fact that Manet, with the railings separating two distinct scenes, was creating a new form of art which was to led to geometrical abstraction in later years.
The exhibition running until May 17th 1998, and held in partnership with the National Gallery of Washington, at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris retraces the history of that area where the « School of la Place (Square) de l'Europe », better known as the school of Impressionism, started to bloom.
Manet's studio was a major meeting place for many artists whose works had been refused by the juries of the official Salon. Caillebotte, Degas, Renoir and Monet were constant visitors while the first railway station of the French capital was considered as the soul of the contemporary world. Monet and Caillebotte both interpreted its poetry through impressive masterpieces, the former producing 11 paintings related to that subject and which showed some incredible audacity in the representation of the station while the latter was more concerned with its immediate vicinity, notably the Pont (bridge) de l'Europe. Monet concentrated anyhow on optical effects, notably with the fumes coming from underneath passing trains that were invading large parts of his paintings blurring figures and buildings and with the priority being given to pure painting.
Ironically enough, the exhibition has been held in the former Orsay railway Station which was transformed into a museum several years ago and such setting has proved ideal to show how a revolution in painting originated from the Saint-Lazare railway station between Manet's railings and Monet's fumes.
Home
