‘Civil War and American Art’ puts the battle in the background
(Collection of Fred Keeler courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum/ ) - \"The Civil War and American Art\" 10/04/12 Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861.
The largest and most dramatic paintings in “The Civil War and American Art” don’t have 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 night sky. Even some of the explicitly military scenes, such as one 1862 canvas showing soldiers gathered to hear Sunday prayers, is more about the grass, trees and a distant, rolling river than it is a narrative of human faith, fear and the fiery furnace.
War isn’t absent in this new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, but it isn’t always in the foreground. Billed as the only major show (during this extended season of Civil War anniversaries) to examine the war and its impact on art, the exhibition includes familiar paintings by Winslow Homer showing soldiers in action, and there is an entire gallery devoted to the nascent art of photography, which brought home the carnage with such force it forever shattered ancient ideas of innocent, manly glory.
(Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum) - Winslow Homer, \"A Visit from the Old Mistress,\" 1876, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans.
But the focus, and the argument, is about more subtle changes in art, detectable in landscape and genera painting, often by implication and suggestion rather than straightforward depiction. So the lowering gray clouds that bear down 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 barren foreground of Sanford Robinson Gifford’s 1861 “Twilight in the Catskills.” A view of a peaceful park setting called Richmond Hill, near London, painted by Jasper Francis Cropsey in 1862-63, is an expat’s subtle reference to another Richmond, in Virginia, then the capital of the Confederacy.
The skeptic might argue that not every hint of uneasiness in a landscape is proof the artist was thinking about war. But in the exhibition’s catalogue essays, curator Eleanor Jones Harvey convincingly demonstrates that in the years before and during the Civil War, artists developed a distinct visual language for representing national anxiety and trauma, and they deployed it in landscape in particular because that was the art that best represented American identity, ambition and moral purpose. Just as the Westerns of mid-20th-century Hollywood 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 just because Americans were fascinated by 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 grand manner of European history painting, including John Trumbull’s classic “Declaration of Independence.” But even the best of these paintings, huge, formal and highly staged, feel a bit awkward for a half-baked democracy. And sometimes, as in John Gadsby Chapman’s “Baptism of Pocahontas,” the results are ludicrous, pretentious and inappropriate.
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