Railway Station [recto] c. 1914 - 1918

Editor: Here we have Charles Hoffbauer's "Railway Station," created sometime between 1914 and 1918, using watercolor and charcoal. There's a sort of melancholic energy to it, a frenetic blur captured in muted tones. What do you see in this piece? Curator: You know, it whispers to me of movement and farewells, that peculiar brand of hurried stillness only a train station knows. It is as if Hoffbauer aimed not to paint a place, but the very atmosphere of wartime departure. See how the blues and grays almost bleed into each other? The people seem to surge forward, yet are strangely muted. Are they ghosts, perhaps? Echoes of goodbyes carried on the wind. Editor: Ghosts! I like that interpretation. But the building itself…it almost looks like a stage backdrop. Is that intentional, do you think? Curator: Perhaps. Think of the era, the theatrics of war propaganda, the grand narratives being woven. Life, then, became a stage, and everyone a player. Or consider this: Maybe Hoffbauer sought to capture the disorienting blend of the real and unreal, of raw emotion and stoic façade that war invariably births within us all. Don’t you think? Editor: Definitely, there’s a tension between the intimate and the impersonal that I didn’t quite catch before. The little glimpses of faces in the lit windows above, almost voyeuristic. Curator: Precisely! And it's in those glimpses, those tiny details amidst the grand rush, that the true human story unfolds. I wonder, did he know someone departing during wartime when he made it? Editor: I’ll definitely be pondering that, thank you!