‘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.
History painting was out of fashion in the United States by 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 dead sprawling along a road and fence at Antietam from Sept. 19, 1862, and his view of war dead at Antietam’s Dunker Church, made the same day. In these, and even more prominently in other photographs of war’s aftermath, the corpses have bloated, and they lie in disorderly array, often with their bodies grotesquely foreshortened by the angle of the image.
Men weren’t dying as they did in a Trumbull painting, like 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 little left but rags and bones by the time they got what was then called a decent burial.
(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.
Americans wouldn’t tolerate the honesty of these photographs today, when many of the assumptions about war and right and wrong that held sway in the age of history painting are resurgent in our new age of sanitized, politicized, war-at-a-distance, in which one side is always heroic and the other pre-civilized practitioners of terrorism.
But the Civil War photographs dismantled heroic assumptions not just by showing the grisly truth of war, but by changing the way we looked. Gardner’s prints often measure no more than three-by-four inches, and when seen in that format, they draw the eye into a thicket of gray information, a clutter of trees 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 attention and focus, turning the experience of the image into something akin to what a scientist does in a laboratory.
In at least one case, there is a hint of photography’s influence on the painter’s technique during these years. Homer Dodge Martin’s “The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York,” is another landscape laden with subtle suggestions of the distant battle. The mine is a small hole halfway up a crumbling hillside, from which debris and rubble spill out and down to the calm, glassy surface of a lake. Iron from these mines, near Lake George, was used to make Parrott guns, a staple of artillery used by the Union.
But Martin’s image not only connects a wounded landscape with the destruction of war, it also captures the density of data 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 then seemed to be photographic texture. The effect is almost queasy and surreal.
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