Interiors VII: The Train from Munich

1991

Robert Townsend

Culture

America

Medium

etching and engraving

Measurements

Platemark: 50.8 x 91.4 cm (20 x 36 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Sabina and John Szoke 2023.90

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Location

Not on view

Did You Know?

A man portrayed to the left of the café window is Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews but who himself disappeared into Soviet Russia in 1945.

Description

Peter Milton’s large-scale, multilayered etching defies visual logic while telling a complex story, that of the last Kindertransport (children’s transport during the Nazi era) to leave Munich carrying his then twelve-year-old wife, Edith. Milton begins with drawings based on real people and places, often using historical photographs, which he reinvents as drawings on Mylar. He exposes the drawings to light-sensitive copper plates and then reuses them in various combinations, creating a collage effect. Here, ghostly apparitions interact with references to real people from history to evoke the near mythical dimensions of the second World War.