Great Railway Stations No. 13: Gare de Lens

Coal mining was the major activity for over a century in the medium sized town of Lens in Northern France but none of it remains today. Like many similar towns and cities in Britain it has struggled to find a new role for itself. In an effort to attract tourism, an annex of the Louvre (Louvre-Lens) opened in 2012. The gallery displays a selection of artworks brought from Paris for a provincial vacation. Visitor numbers have fallen from 900,000 in the first year to 450,000 in 2017 which suggests the Bilbao-effect is fading fast. Some of these visitors will have arrived by train in which case it’s to be hoped they had a good look at the station buildings or they would have missed one of France’s most distinctive and eccentric station buildings.

The present Gare de Lens was designed and built 1926-27 by architect, Urbain Cassan (1890 - 1979). Cassan also designed stations for Senlis, Brest and Saint-Quentin and later was involved in the design for the Tour Montparnasse (1973). For Lens, Cassan came up with a plan said to be inspired by the shape of a steam locomotive boiler in which the rounded arches represent the wheels and a tower to represent the funnel. The concourse and booking hall was decorated on all four walls with mosaic panels that portrayed the local industry, coal mining and the miners who extracted the coal in stylised pictorial form. They were the work of Auguste Labouret (1871-1964). Labouret was principally a stained glass artist with a reputation for the sensitive restoration of church stained glass. But he often worked on railway stations, among others, Saint Quentin (also designed by Cassan), Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare.

Each decorative panel is about 1.5m in height, extending to almost the full width of the station interior. Over the ticket windows we see colliery winding gear and associated industrial buildings in a modified Cubist idiom. Another panel is flanked by grim-faced miners, shouldering pick-axes and gripping miners’ lamps against a backdrop of pit-heads, slag heaps and smoking chimneys. The third panel is a landscape of bridges and factory buildings with cargo ships and tugs. The final panel (and the one that greets the arriving passenger) continues and develops the communication theme, pipes and tubes, telegraph wires to one side – on the other a massive steam locomotive powers its way into the composition. The installation appears to be made with standard-size tiles, some of which are laid intact, though most are fragmented to a greater or lesser degree. The colour scheme is a muted harmony of blacks, whites, greys and brown.

The station buildings and the tower are all rendered and painted white with decorative patterned concrete mouldings. The Art Deco-inspired window frames are formed of slender, geometric glazing bars, painted in red. A Deco-styled font was used for the original cast iron signage on the platform. To see the resemblance to a steam engine requires a little imaginative effort but it remains a splendid conceit and the only scheme where Cassan attempted anything like it. To their credit, SNCF maintain the building in first class condition.

Marxism in Mosaics

Totalitarian regimes always have resources available for large scale public art as a way to reinforce the state ideology. These mosaics adorn the Haus des Lehrers (Teachers’ Building) at Alexanderplatz in what was then East Berlin and wrap the building in suitably uplifting educational messages. It was one of the DDR’s first modernist tower blocks and housed a large library of books on education and conference and meeting facilities for educators. Walter Womacka (1925-2010) designed the scheme, known as Unser Leben (Our Life ) to focus the public mind on the technological and economic achievements of Socialism and the one true path to world peace. Womacka was a regime favourite and had risen through the world of art education to become Rector of the Künsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (DDR State Art College) from 1968-88. As Vice President of the VBK (compulsory state register of artists) it was his job to identify and expel the ideologically unreliable. He was rewarded with a series of major state commissions for giant murals on public buildings. State approved overseas travel was another regime perk – on a visit to Syria he was invited to paint a portrait of President Hafez al-Assad, father of the present incumbent, Bashar - ophthalmologist and mass-murderer.

The visual language was an embalmed version of the Mexican Muralists with their impeccable revolutionary credentials combined with Socialist Realism, by tradition and practice, an idiom from which all visual excitement was excluded. A gowned and masked surgeon poses in the operating theatre while satellite dishes and communication towers beam down a message of hope. Then a white coated chemist holds up a flask containing the distilled essence of Marxist-Leninist thought. To his right, an astronomer of Asian origin stands in front of a vast radio-telescope while a rocket is launched bearing fraternal greetings to the farthest reaches of space. Elsewhere doves of peace are released into the heavens to melt the stony hearts of the capitalist West. Contented proletarians enjoy the blessings of state-controlled consumption, proudly observing their dutiful offspring acquiring the scientific skills that will take the nation forward into its glorious future. Among all these uplifting messages, it’s difficult to select just one but the constant repetition of the language of pacifism is perhaps the most egregious element. Some guilty pleasures catch the eye – tilting planes and surfaces locking compositional elements, period mid-century infographics and the occasional echoes of Leger, another who never lost his faith in Marxism.

Cork Flooring

The High Altar in the apse at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork rests on a mosaic floor designed by William Burges. Crustaceans, molluscs and amphibians in mosaic form share the space with artisans, scholars and parfait knights. The initial inspiration for this piscatorial fantasy came from St. Matthew, “.... the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind”. There’s a useful account of the mosaics in J Mordaunt Crook’s William Burges and the High Victorian Dream – Crook is well disposed toward the mosaics but clearly regards them as a minor aspect of Burges’s achievement. Crook tells how they were manufactured in 1877 by Burke & Co. in Paris by a team of Italian craft-workers from Udine using Pyrenean marble fragments. The imagery has a light and playful character that is not something routinely found in a High Anglican place of worship but one of Burges’s many redeeming features was an appetite for fun and a liking for puns. The latter inspired him to include bobbing corks (unfortunately not visible in this selection) in his aquatic fantasia.