The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change ed. by Susan Danly, Leo Marx

Abstract

1052 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the book’s finest essay, centered on Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Marx reminds us that the more “natural” we assume that proto-landscape to have been, the more dangerous is its power to distort. At the conclusion of Fitzgerald’s novel, Nick Carraway, seeking to compre­ hend Gatsby’s corrupt life and tawdry death, realizes that the vision of “the fresh, green breast of the new world” had pandered to Gatsby’s hope of recapturing the spurious innocence of the past. In short, says Marx, the pastoral landscape is a region of the mind: to amplify inner states is to disengage, in effect to retreat from politics. Thus, despite their supposed subversiveness, pastoral ideals may paralyze their adherents. What remains, then, is a powerful residual conflict appropriate to a culture in love with—and at war with —nature. As Marx puts it most happily, this troubled consciousness of alternatives is a gift that history has given to American art: “the simultaneous attraction of two visions of a people’s destiny” (p. 118). The essays themselves are a gift to students of American culture. Animated by enormous intelligence and generosity, they are the historical record of a great critical mind. Joseph W. Slade Dr. Slade is chair of the Department of Media Arts at Long Island University, Brooklyn, the author of Thomas Pynchon, and editor of The Markham Review. He is currently writing a study of the Maxims, an American family of inventors. The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change. Edited by Susan Danly and Leo Marx. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 218; illustrations, notes, index. $35.00. The Railroad in American Art is an immensely valuable contribution to the literature on the relations between technology and the visual arts, an area whose exploration by scholars has been steadily expand­ ing. This book will be essential reading for historians of art, technol­ ogy, literature, and other fields related to 19th-century American culture. Having its genesis in an exhibition catalog, The Railroad and the American Landscape: 1850—1950, published by the Wellesley College Museum in 1981, this volume represents a much more thorough exploration of this cultural symbol’s most significant aspects. Susan Danly’s fine introductory essay provides an intelligent overview, orienting the reader to a fascinating subject. She begins with Thomas Cole, the first of our landscapists to pay serious attention to the railroad’s aesthetic implications, and extends her coverage through 1970s photorealist paintings by John Baeder of Pullman diners. The eight essays present a wide range of approaches and material as they ground the images within the larger culture that helped shape TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1053 them. The authors approach their subject from thematic, patronal, economic, technological, visual, and iconographical perspectives. Some focus on specific images by single artists, including Kenneth W. Maddox (“Asher B. Durand’s Progress: The Advance of Civilization and the Vanishing American”), who considers the effect on the native peoples who lived near the railroad routes. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. (“George Inness’s The Lackawanna Valley: ‘Type of the Modern’”), discusses a key railroad painting, one he first wrote about in a 1970 article published in the American Art Journal. James F. O’Gorman’s topic (“Man-Made Mountain: ‘Gathering and Governing’ in H. H. Richardson’s Design for the Ames Monument in Wyoming”) may not be by a strict definition a representation of the railroad in American art, but the unusual perspective it permits makes it a telling inclusion. Susan Fillin-Yeh’s essay (“Charles Sheeler’s Rolling Power”} is the strongest one on 20th-century art, in part because it considers an artist with strongly specific technological concerns. Other writers present a series of images by a single artist, including Susan Danly (“Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated.”} and Gail Levin (“Edward Hopper’s Railroad Imagery”). Dominic Ricciotti (“The Railroad in the City”) discusses the subject’s implications for early American modernism and Precisionism. Leo Marx’s concluding and broadly thematic meditation (“The Railroad-in-the-Landscape: An Iconological Reading of a Theme in American Art”), in contrast to many of his insightful writings, lacks focus, especially as...