How and Why Did Art Change During the Civil War
"The Civil War and American Art" 10/04/12 Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861. (Collection of Fred Keeler courtesy of the Smithsonian American Fine art Museum)
The largest and most dramatic paintings in "The Civil War and American Art" don't take anything particularly warlike in them, no cannons or gun smoke or bayonets glistening in the morning sun. Rather, there are landscapes, mountain vistas, seaside idylls and views of the nighttime sky. Even some of the explicitly military scenes, such as i 1862 canvas showing soldiers gathered to hear Sunday prayers, is more well-nigh the grass, trees and a afar, rolling river than it is a narrative of human faith, fear and the fiery furnace.
War isn't absent-minded in this new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Fine art Museum, but it isn't always in the foreground. Billed equally the only major show (during this extended flavour of Civil State of war anniversaries) to examine the state of war and its bear upon on art, the exhibition includes familiar paintings past Winslow Homer showing soldiers in action, and there is an entire gallery devoted to the nascent art of photography, which brought dwelling the carnage with such force it forever shattered aboriginal ideas of innocent, manly glory.
Just the focus, and the argument, is about more than subtle changes in art, detectable in landscape and genera painting, frequently past implication and proposition rather than straightforward delineation. So the lowering gray clouds that bear downwardly from the top of Martin Johnson Heade's 1859 view of two boats on a placid bay is a portent of war, as are the dead trees and arid foreground of Sanford Robinson Gifford's 1861 "Twilight in the Catskills." A view of a peaceful park setting called Richmond Loma, near London, painted by Jasper Francis Cropsey in 1862-63, is an expat's subtle reference to some other Richmond, in Virginia, so the capital of the Confederacy.
The skeptic might argue that not every hint of uneasiness in a landscape is proof the artist was thinking most war. But in the exhibition'due south catalogue essays, curator Eleanor Jones Harvey convincingly demonstrates that in the years earlier and during the Civil War, artists developed a distinct visual language for representing national feet and trauma, and they deployed it in landscape in particular because that was the fine art that best represented American identity, ambition and moral purpose. But as the Westerns of mid-20th-century Hollywood tin can bear a remarkable amount of allegorical and interpretive weight, the landscapes of the mid-19th century were freighted with national themes.
Landscape thrived not but because Americans were fascinated past grand vistas, and analogized open territory to endless possibility, but for historical reasons, too. Walk into the Rotunda of the United States Capital and you see earnest attempts (by an earlier generation of artists) to wed American themes to the g fashion of European history painting, including John Trumbull'south classic "Declaration of Independence." But fifty-fifty the best of these paintings, huge, formal and highly staged, feel a fleck bad-mannered for a half-baked commonwealth. And sometimes, as in John Gadsby Chapman'south "Baptism of Pocahontas," the results are ludicrous, pretentious and inappropriate.
Winslow Homer, "A Visit from the Old Mistress," 1876, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Fine art Museum, Souvenir of William T. Evans. (Courtesy Smithsonian American Fine art Museum)
History painting was out of fashion in the United states of america past the time the Civil War was brewing, and worse, photography was emerging with a power and precision of representation that would deflate many of the heroic pretensions on which history painting was premised. The exhibition includes several of Alexander Gardner's Civil War scenes, including Confederate expressionless sprawling along a route and fence at Antietam from Sept. 19, 1862, and his view of war dead at Antietam'southward Dunker Church building, fabricated the aforementioned day. In these, and even more prominently in other photographs of state of war'southward aftermath, the corpses have bloated, and they lie in disorderly array, ofttimes with their bodies grotesquely foreshortened by the angle of the paradigm.
Men weren't dying equally they did in a Trumbull painting, similar Gen. John Warren at Bunker Hill, elegant in his white uniform and surrounded by heroic defenders caught up in a cinematic, swashbuckling drama. They were dropping and rotting and, as captured in John Reekie's photograph of "A Burial Party, Cold Harbor," there was piddling left but rags and basic by the time they got what was so called a decent burial.
Americans wouldn't tolerate the honesty of these photographs today, when many of the assumptions nearly war and correct and wrong that held sway in the age of history painting are resurgent in our new age of sanitized, politicized, war-at-a-altitude, in which one side is always heroic and the other pre-civilized practitioners of terrorism.
But the Civil State of war photographs dismantled heroic assumptions not only by showing the grisly truth of war, only by changing the way nosotros looked. Gardner'due south prints often mensurate no more than iii-past-four inches, and when seen in that format, they draw the eye into a thicket of greyness information, a clutter of copse and limbs and people and fences that is the very opposite of the wall-size battle scenes that thrilled European audiences for centuries. Rather than inspiring awe and overwhelming with the pure sensuality of paint, the scale of the photograph demanded attending and focus, turning the feel of the epitome into something alike to what a scientist does in a laboratory.
In at least i instance, there is a hint of photography's influence on the painter'southward technique during these years. Homer Dodge Martin'south "The Atomic number 26 Mine, Port Henry, New York," is another landscape laden with subtle suggestions of the afar battle. The mine is a minor pigsty halfway up a aging hillside, from which debris and rubble spill out and down to the at-home, glassy surface of a lake. Iron from these mines, near Lake George, was used to brand Parrott guns, a staple of artillery used by the Union.
But Martin'southward image non only connects a wounded mural with the destruction of war, information technology too captures the density of information and the busy confusion of the photograph at the level of paint. The crumbling brown earth is meticulously but frenetically rendered, not with what we might call photographic realism, but with what may have and so seemed to be photographic texture. The result is almost queasy and surreal.
The exhibition includes 75 works, and many of them will be familiar to students of 19th-century American painting. Winslow Homer, who saw the war firsthand and translated his impressions and sketches into at present iconic paintings, including "The Sharpshooter" and "Defiance: Inviting a Shot Earlier Petersburg," is heavily represented. Of the artists who chose to capture the war itself, Homer was the nigh competent, only figure painting was not his forte and i is glad every time the shadow of a hat or turned head obviates the demand for depicting a face.
The war is seen more crudely but artlessly in the small but well-observed paintings of Conrad Wise Chapman, the rare Confederate artist of even minimal competence. Chapman captured what he saw as the glory and what was presently the wreckage of Southern military appetite in and around Charleston, S.C. The compositions are static, with occasional reminders of the slave presence in the class of inert African American figures property horses or attending to the menial needs of white people.
The Union would apply Parrott guns, made from iron from mines such as the one depicted in Martin's prototype of Upstate New York, to bombard Chapman'due south love Charleston and its harbor fortifications. Throughout this exhibition, one is struck by how a civil state of war both severs and forges connections, uniting people in misery if dividing them in all else. Information technology brought men out of their homes and into the open-air theater of battle, connecting them to landscape in a very real, firsthand sense. Information technology also brought many Northerners into their kickoff sustained contact with African Americans, whose enslavement was the cause of the war.
Some of the most disturbing and fascinating images capture race anxiety both during and after the state of war, equally Americans confronted the aftermath of slavery and the unknown impact it would have on cultural life. An 1864 painting by Eastman Johnson (who emerges as a serious and fascinating creative person in this exhibition) shows a comfortably well-to-practice white family in a luxurious parlor. A young boy plays with a minstrel doll, making this representation of an African American dance on a piece of potent paper or wood held at the edge of a table so as to produce a precipice. An innocent game enacted over the void of an unknown future has the entire family unit mesmerized, as twilight seems to gather outside the window.
The exhibition isn't large enough to cover every theme. The argument almost landscape is thoroughly made, and possibly might be made more concisely, leaving room for other tangents. Some representation of the degraded country of history painting would help. The catalogue includes a reproduction of Everett B.D. Fabrino Julio's infamous "The Last Meeting," a painting of Robert Due east. Lee and Stonewall Jackson only earlier the latter's death.
Mocked thoroughly and well by Mark Twain, and a favorite source of amusement for visitors to the Museum of the Confederacy, which owns it, "The Last Meeting" would brand very clear the reason why serious painters were turning away from history painting. One bad painting can put many good ones in perspective. But it isn't included, nor any other similar work.
Reconciliation, which begins cropping upwards equally a theme in paintings well before the war was over is dealt with only glancingly. Paintings such as Jervis McEntee's 1862 "The Fire of Leaves" sees two children dressed in clothes that "evoke the uniforms of the Union and the Confederacy," sitting together in a dark and moody landscape. Painted before George Cochran Lambdin'southward 1865 "The Consecration" (not seen in the exhibition, but a powerful fantasy of Union and Confederate reconciliation), McEntee's painting shows how deeply a premature fantasy of reunion was congenital into the war, making it difficult to root out the cultural toxin of slavery and resentment in the S during Reconstruction.
The theme of "getting dorsum to normal" also crops up in landscape, and the exhibition ends with yet more than behemothic landscape images. Visually it's a dainty envoi, and it will propose to warning visitors a theme explored in the catalogue but not obvious from the exhibition: the extent to which making and preserving mural, in the course of national parks and the fantasy landscapes of our urban preserves, became the focus for many of the energies animated by mural painting before the war.
But the tone isn't quite correct. Reconstruction failed, and its failure brought at least another century of misery for many African Americans.
Perhaps a hint of the mythologizing of the war at the half-century ceremony, or some cursory clip of the war from the 1915 motion-picture show "Birth of Nation," or some reminder of the panorama paintings which turned the state of war into entertainment for the bored, ignorant and idle in the late 19th century, would help. That would shift the emphasis from art to history, which the curator might reasonably resist. Just it would remind the states of the bad and the ugly from this period, which have arguably lasted longer and had more bear on than the more nuanced efforts of artists to capture the subtle traces of war in the fascinating images seen in this exhibition.
The Civil War and American Art
is on view through April 28 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F streets NW. For more data, visit americanart.si.edu.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/civil-war-and-american-art-puts-the-battle-in-the-background/2012/11/21/6b392632-3337-11e2-bfd5-e202b6d7b501_story.html
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