This portrait of “two young women in voluminous dresses” in The Travelling Companions (1862), by the Victorian London artist Augustus Leopold Egg, shows the inspiration of journeying by train in a way that air travel simply cannot
© Birmingham Museums Trust
One of the most famous train journeys in art was Vincent van Gogh’s trip from Paris to Arles in February 1888 on the PLM, or Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée Express. Although steam locomotion had been a subject for artists for some time, in his painting Van Gogh was the first to show the way train travel had transformed both the landscape and human perception of the world. Landscape at Auvers after Rain (1890; in the collection of the Pushkin Museum) is one of his great evocations of trains, with its thrilling sensation of speed and the cinematic rush of landscape seen from the window.
Railway travel has been part of the history of art in a way that flying cannot rival. What great paintings of early plane travel are there to rival J.M.W. Turner or Adolph Menzel’s visions of the first locomotives? Which airports have been painted with the devotion Monet bestowed upon the Gare Saint-Lazare? And which air terminals for that matter have been transformed into museums? What images of aeroplane interiors are there to rival the train carriage drawings of Daumier? Or a painting such as Augustus Egg’s The Travelling Companions (1862), showing two young women in voluminous dresses taking up a compartment travelling through southern Europe, the single brilliant detail of a swinging tassel on the window recording the jolting movement of the train?
Van Gogh’s Landscape at Auvers after Rain (1890) conveys a thrilling sense of the train’s speed Album/Alamy Stock Photo
There are many good reasons to travel by rail in the name of art. I recently travelled to Istanbul and back by train, having been invited to give a lecture at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. It was hardly an easy undertaking, and took long hours of preparation.
What could have been an overnighter by plane, with airport taxis to the hotel door, turned into a two-week epic, involving a seemingly interminable sequence of day and night trains, and adventures in the dead of night in the Carpathian Mountains, when the Romanian train service faltered.
The journey was arduous, and clearly would not be possible for everyone, either physically or in terms of available time. But where flying would have been cheap and convenient, travelling by train was life itself — endless encounters with people, places and art. Paris, Salzburg, Budapest and Bucharest, all cities I would not necessarily have visited, became part of the landscapes of art and life through which the sequence of trains passed.
On the return journey from Turkey, I left the customary route, via Bucharest and Budapest, and boarded a very slow train, with doors that did not properly close, which ambled interminably across the Wallachian Plain to the remote town of Târgu Jiu. I was there of course to visit Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column Ensemble (1938), one of the greatest sculptures of the 20th century and recently named a Unesco World Heritage site.
Reaching Târgu on the slow train from Bucharest was great mental preparation for the encounter with this most perfect and also perplexing of objects, which appeared, after days on the tracks, like an image of eternal locomotion itself, the stacked rhomboids like sleeper carriages rising into blue infinity.
As the curator Max Andrews has written, the international contemporary art world has for a long time depended for its existence on cheap passenger and freight flights, conveniently ignoring the fact that air travel has been responsible for 4% of the global temperature rise since the dawn of industrialisation.
Gustav Metzger’s RAF (Reduce Arts Flights) campaign, which was inaugurated in 2007 in reaction to the sheer number of journeys made to the Venice Biennale, Documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibitions that year. One of the few organisations to take a strong position on art flying, the highly commendable Gallery Climate Coalition, have published details of how to travel by train to the Venice Biennale (a journey I also made earlier this year, although not for the Biennale), as well as comparisons of the carbon emissions of plane and train travel. Of course, the best way to reduce your carbon emissions is not to travel at all, but to stay at home and read a good book about art.
From the point of view of carbon emissions, no flight is justifiable unless strictly necessary. And no journey by plane to see art is strictly necessary. Neither is it ever vital to transport works of art by air freight. The short-term consequences of not doing so are in no way severe; they are matters instead of inconvenience and disappointment. These might seem radical claims, but when you consider the prognosis from the latest UN Emissions Gap report of catastrophic 3°C warming by the end of the century—within the lifetime of children now at primary school—such “radical” claims are quickly put into perspective.
At present there seems no realistic sense in which there will be a sudden decrease in air travel that will have a significant effect on carbon emissions. The opposite is rather the case. Commercial flights are increasing every year and constitute the fastest-growing source of transport carbon emissions in the EU, with ever-mounting demand for air travel, new flight routes opening and more cargo driven by e-commerce and global trade. Private jet sales, abhorrent to most who cannot afford them, and probably also to some who can, were on track to hit an all-time high in 2024, exceeding pre-pandemic levels—the same is true for private flights, which burn many times more greenhouse gases than commercial flights.
Why stop flying then, when in practical terms it will make no difference at all? You might say it is a matter of individual responsibility, but it is also a reflection of the fact that, as a recent report by Greenpeace showed, just 1% of the world’s population are responsible for more than half of the global climate emissions caused by aviation. The same report showed that though rail trips are, on the whole, twice as expensive as flights, the climate impact from flying can be more than 80 times that of travelling by train.
Choosing not to fly is what might be termed an Act of Recognition of this state of affairs, a direct means of publicly acknowledging the gravity of the problems that face us, and which for the most part we simply pretend do not exist. One of the greatest stresses on mental health for young people is climate, and one of the principal sources of that stress is the “cognitive dissonance” of the deeply disturbing indifference of the general populace to the clear facts of the intensification of extreme weather due to climate breakdown. Most of us continue by and large with our daily lives, trying to ignore the catastrophe unfolding all around.
Even the mantra of corporate “sustainability” can seem to avoid the reality of ever-increasing emissions, as well as the potentially devastating yet hidden knock-on effects of passing climate tipping points. This is the “sting in the tail” of environmental breakdown and poses the greatest threat to our world, in the words of a report published last year by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
It is also a matter of professional responsibility. Globetrotting art trips, accompanied by the obligatory posted images of artworks on Instagram (and I place myself in the front ranks of the culpable in years gone by), appear increasingly to be a contradiction of the values of truth and care paramount in the realm of art and museums, particularly from those in positions of public trust.
The other, happier, reason is that trains, like boats, bicycles and feet, are simply better ways to make the journey to art. These were the means of locomotion, by and large, for artists throughout history. This was their experience of the world and they recorded it in works of art.
Seeing art by train is the next big thing. Get on board.
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