Kansas City, MO – A major international exhibition opening this fall at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will capture the excitement and range of emotions that steam-powered trains elicited as railroads reshaped culture around the world. The exhibition, Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830-1960, open from Sept. 13 through Jan. 18, 2009, will feature more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and photographs drawn from 64 museums and private collections.

The exhibition opened first at Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where it was on view from April 18 to Aug. 10. It drew more than 113,000 visitors and received excellent reviews in general and scholarly publications. Extensive exhibition-related programming has been developed not only at the Nelson-Atkins, but also with eight Kansas City-area community partners.

In light of Kansas City’s historic position as a railway town, this exhibition has strong local resonance. At the same time, it captures the international fascination with the steam train as both an inspiration for art and a life-changing experience for the world at large, said Marc F. Wilson, Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell Director/CEO of the Nelson-Atkins. It is especially fitting that the exhibition arrives from Liverpool, another city with transportation at the core of its modern history.

Among the works of art are modern and Impressionist masterpieces, including Edouard Manet’s The Railway,  Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, Gustave Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe and Rene Magritte’s Time Transfixed. The exhibition features works that span a variety of styles, from an early lithograph by John Cooke Bourne, No. 1 Tunnel, to Edward Hopper’s modern Railroad Sunset, and Thomas Hart Benton’s The Wreck of the Ole 97. Photography, which also came of age during the rise of steam trains, is represented with works by Alfred Steiglitz, Charles Sheeler, André Kertész and O. Winston Link.

The exhibition demonstrates how art and technology came together to contribute to the definition of modernity, exemplified by the speeding up of modern life in an increasingly mechanical society, said Ian Kennedy, Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins, who co-curated the exhibition with Julian Treuherz, former Keeper of Art for National Museums Liverpool, England.

Britain was the cradle of the railroad and Liverpool was a major railroad terminal. The railroad was critical for the westward expansion of the young United States, and Kansas City’s Union Station was the nation’s second largest railroad station after Chicago.

The exhibition will be presented in six sections:

The Railway in Art : Early observers viewed the steam train with combined wonder and fear. Many early prints and paintings explored the evolving landscape of the industrial age, punctuated with the bridges and viaducts built to accommodate the new trains. The view from the train car provided a new panoramic—almost cinematic—perspective. Particularly in the American west, broad landscape paintings illustrated the cinematic point of view from a railroad carriage, emblematic of the vast and unexplored frontier now made accessible by train travel. Prints and paintings also focused on train stations themselves as new centers of city life. Reactions were not purely celebratory, though: Honoré Daumier’s realist works hinted at the anxieties of mixing with strangers of different classes in the closed compartments of a train car.

Later in the 19th century, the French Impressionists latched onto the steam train as a symbol of modernity, simultaneously heralding and expressing anxiety about the fast pace of the new city. The train provided a convenient link between city and country, condensing what had previously been a day of travel time into an hour, and many Impressionist works explored the newly-accessible countryside as a site of leisure, a counterpoint to the bustling city. Stylistically, the bursts of steam spewed by the trains provided stunning illustrations of the emphasis on light and movement that characterizes Impressionism.

In the early 20th century, modern artists used the train to explore abstracted depictions of speed and power in an increasingly mechanized society. Russian poster designers celebrated the train as the epitome of strength and power and as a valuable tool for a Socialist system. Art Nouveau travel posters, meanwhile, depicted the train as a sleek bullet and the essence of glamour.

The railway continued to serve as a metaphor for power or the restlessness and alienation of modern life well into the 20th century, especially in the works of Hopper and Benton, but eventually with the increasing dominance of new forms of transport – railway art became imbued with nostalgia for a golden age, particularly after steam haulage was superseded by diesel or electric traction. Nostalgia for a vanishing age is poignantly expressed in the photography of O. Winston Link.

A full-color catalog published by Yale University Press is directed at both art lovers and railroad enthusiasts. It opens with a historical introduction by Oxford University lecturer Michael Freeman, followed by an essay by University College London lecturer Matthew Beaumont on the railroad and literature. The catalog is divided into six sections written by the co-curators Kennedy and Treuherz, who address the ways in which various artistic schools and artists addressed the subject of railroads. The catalog also includes extensive technical notes on works exhibited, as well as a timeline and bibliography. The catalog will be available at the Museum Store.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America’s finest encyclopedic art museums. The Nelson-Atkins serves the community by providing access and insight into its renowned collection of more than 33,500 art objects and is best known for its Asian art, European and American paintings and modern sculpture. Housing a major art research library and the Ford Learning Center, the Museum is a key educational resource for the region and a national model for arts education. The Nelson-Atkins’ expansion is also leading a field of new investments in local cultural infrastructure that is becoming known as Kansas City’s $6 Billion Renaissance.

The recently completed 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building by Steven Holl Architects was a major milestone in the ongoing institution-wide transformation of the Nelson-Atkins. The multi-year project also encompassed the renovation of the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins Building and the expansion of the Museum’s renowned Kansas City Sculpture Park, and continues with renovations to the American and American Indian galleries as part of the reinstallation of the encyclopedic collection.

The Nelson-Atkins is located at 45th and Oak streets, Kansas City, Mo. Hours are Wednesday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Admission to the Museum’s permanent collection is free to everyone. Additionally, newly produced audio guides are free for visitors, presenting art & architecture tours, overall collection highlights, and select special exhibitions tours. For Museum information, phone 816.751.1ART (1278) or visit : www.nelson-atkins.org.