Le Voyage En Train

Exhibition at the Musée d'Arts de Nantes, 21 October 2022 - 5 February 2023

From the middle of the 19th century onwards, the development of the railway changed the conception and perception of time and space. The train was the driving force behind a profound transformation of artistic representations, generating various iconographic and aesthetic responses, both critical and admiring of modernity, which fed the evolution of a modern art that renounced, in part, the ideal of a fixed point of view on an immutable pre-industrial world.

This catalogue of the first French exhibition dedicated to the subject offers a comparison between the development of the train in France between the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century and modern art. Around one hundred works by the greatest artists of the time, including Monet, Tissot, van Gogh, Hodler and Sonia Delaunay, allow us to discover the renewal of artistic conceptions thanks to the railway.

The exhibition benefits from the exceptional support of the Musée d'Orsay and presents masterpieces on loan from prestigious public and private collections (National Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou, etc.).