“The Art of the Milwaukee Road” at the Grohmann Museum offers a ticket to the yesteryear of train travel. The Milwaukee Road, more formally named the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, treated visitors to speedy travel and epic views of the northwest United States in its lauded double-decker Super Dome cars, where the vaulted roof was dissolved by expansive windows.
The rail line was mixed in its use, hauling both freight and tourists. The exhibition emphasizes the latter, more leisurely category with photographs, prints and other ephemera reflecting the sleek design and bright optimism that shaped the American mystique at midcentury. A color photograph from 1950 titled Olympian Hiawatha celebrates the eponymously named train as it waits in a station. From a high angle, we peer into the train where an unimpeachably confident man and woman sit in a car decorated with shiny silver accouterments. They pointedly look out the window at a couple making their way along the platform, exchanging gazes like a secret handshake that says, “Welcome to the American dream.”
One of the most surrealistically fascinating photographs is an undated picture, Milwaukee Road Sky Top on Trestle. Weathered iron scaffolding supports the train like it is crowdsurfing over the tops of tall pine trees while the sheer mountain cliffs framing the composition suggest reasons why it was easier for the train to seemingly ride on air rather than the ground at this point.
The marketing of train travel is romantic and aspirational, but let us not forget the brawn that makes it move. A series of reproduced photographs of workers from The Milwaukee Road Rail Yard and Shops are also on view. In these black-and-white images, diminutive men are pitted against massive, heavy metal machinery as they meet the demands and dreams of the railway.
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One feeds into another: the heavy labor and behind-the-scenes grit make the infrastructure for pleasure and adventure, the world viewed serenely through the protective lens of The Milwaukee Road’s Super Dome cars. This compact exhibition alludes to the rhythmic roll of these symbiotic forces.
“The Art of the Milwaukee Road” continues through April 26 at the Grohmann Museum on the MSOE Campus, 1000 N. Broadway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiQr2-4QeY4
