FI

As seen in the November/december issue of

AM rICAN

Nov/DEC 2012

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art

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Strifes Harvest
The Civil War and American Art at the Smithsonian opens November 16

November 16-April 28, 2013

Smithsonian American Art Museum 8th and F streets N.W. Washington, D.C. 20004 t: (202) 633-7970 www.americanart.si.edu by James Balestrieri

he rights of states versus the role of the federal government, the rights of people to dispose of their property as they see fit, the contending values of urban and rural, industrial and agrarian America, immigration, the role of religion in the state, the issue of racein this election year, reading Eleanor Jones Harveys superb and meticulous catalog for the Smithsonian American Art Museums exhibition The Civil War and American Art, mounted to mark the sesquicentennial of our nations bloodiest war and only internecine conflict, one has to wonder: is the Civil War really over? True, no states are currently seceding, though there have been threats from the governor of Texas. And ownership of human beings is outlawed, though the rhetoric of slavery continues to be adapted to political discourse: shall the government enslave us, or shall we live in thrall to corporate masters? But even though the actual issues may have changed, todays map of red and blue states in many ways resembles the map of the blue and the gray. As if aware of the ongoing tensions, The Civil War and American Art is a thorough, careful exhibition, and it is all the more essential for the attention that has been paid to the various strains of art and photography as they responded to a war which had an outcome that was all but certain.

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), The Camp of the Seventh Regiment near Frederick, Maryland, 1863. Oil on canvas. Lent by private collection.

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Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Prisoners from the Front, 1866. Oil on canvas. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922. Image The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967. Image The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Harvey wisely deconstructs a staggering number of works into four categories: landscape painting; photographythe Civil War is the first war in history to be photographed extensively; paintings by artists who served or accompanied the armies into battle; and paintings, especially those by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, that specifically reference abolition and emancipation. The exhibition centers on artists working in or near New York, largely because the cityapart from the Draft Riots of 1863saw no action. Harvey explains that the Southern art market all but evaporated during the war. Many wealthy patrons fled to Europe and many of the great cities of the South were occupied or destroyed. Nonetheless, 10 paintings by Conrad Wise Chapman, who enlisted in the army of the Confederacy and was made a staff artist under General Beauregard, provide some balance, as do works by E. L. Henry, Julian Scott, and others who saw in the Rebel defeat the passing of the antebellum way of life and were shocked at the suffering of the Southern states. The victors write the histories, so the saying goes. They paint them as well. The exhibition boasts a number of fine landscapes. Among them, Martin Johnson Heades 1859 masterpiece, Approaching Thunder Storm, stands out. Seen in the context of the 19th-century American landscape traditionas it is in its permanent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Artit is a brooding, forwardlooking work. The overlapping flat fields, strong shapes and intrusions of color anticipate strategies more common to later masters like Edward Hopper, Victor Higgins, and Fairfield Porter. But when it was first exhibited in the spring of 1860,

Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910), Battery Bee, Dec. 3, 1863, 1863-64. Oil on board. 11 x 15 in. The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond,Virginia, photography by Alan Thompson.

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Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859. Oil on canvas, 28 x 44 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Erving Wolf Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 1975. Image The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

just after the abolitionist John Browns fatefuland failedslave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the idea of the coming storm was a common metaphor for what many saw as an unavoidable conflict between the Northern and Southern states. Heade, an opponent of slavery, sold the work to Noah Schenck, an abolitionist preacher and friend of Henry Ward Beecher, by far the most prominent among those who thundered from pulpits against the evils of slavery. It is perhaps no accident, as the catalog observes, that Beecher also owned one of Heades storm scenes. While the context brings the work to life, it is visually arresting on its own. The wrecked sailboat, the sail draped limply on the rocks, the man and dog sitting calmly, turned away from the viewer, watching the rower make for shore and the sailboat try to run round the point, these are strangely placid, flaccid elements in a moment that seems as if it should

be filled with energy. The ship of stateanother popular euphemism for the nationis either hopelessly wrecked, or helpless, or running before the wind. The flat planes of blackening gray in the sky and water simultaneously confirm and deny the sense of perspective, foreshortening and compressing time and space. The daggers of land at right and left, and the narrow near shore, despite being brilliantly lit, offer only a temporary, shrinking respite. The soaring landscapes of Cole, Durand, Church, and Bierstadt that conferred our New Eden, give way to a more disturbing vision of nature as amoral, indifferent, or hostile. In the war-related landscapes of Sanford Robinson Giffordwho served in the Union armyand Frederic Church, skies become blood red, trees are blasted and burned. Nature, reflecting our violent schism, turns against us, mirroring the judgment of an angry God. The intentionally malevolent

sky in Giffords magnificent work, A Coming Storm, 1863, persists in special poignancy and ironya matter of public record even then, as the exhibition statesas its owner was none other than Edwin Booth, Americas foremost actor and brother to President Lincolns assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Only after the war, as westward expansion came to the fore in the American mind, did landscape assume anything of its former, benign aspect. To this point, The Civil War and American Art is a relatively bloodless affairthen there are the photographs. In them, the war comes home. The dead come to life. Photography, a young art then, had seen some action in the Crimean War. But artistsfor they saw themselves as suchlike Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy H. OSullivan, carrying cumbersome cameras over rough terrain, often at great personal risk, raced to the great battlefields of the
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Civil War to capture the horror of war with an immediacy no one could have imagined. Where Brady and his team of photographers focused on the ruined forests and landscapes as symbols, capturing the topographies of war much as Heade, Gifford and others did in painting, Gardner and his team chose to depict the dead, setting standards for journalistic on-thescene veracity that lasted until the two Iraq wars and the war in Afghanistan. Though these early photographers did, on occasion, move a body for effect or superimpose a more dramatic sky onto a vista of rubbleeffects that were noted by contemporariespeople in New York and Washington flocked to view these photographs. It is easy to see why. Even now, 150 years later, they are as hard to look away from as they are hard to look at. Timothy O Sullivans A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, 1863, is perhaps the best known photograph of the war. As ghosts in the mistfor so they seem to beone mounted, two on foot survey the tilted fieldas if the corpses in their unnatural contortions will slide away, leftward down the slopeas if we wish they wouldwhat comes to mind is Whitman, Walt Whitman, in Specimen Days, writing about the battles he saw, the wounded he tended

Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), A Ride for LibertyThe Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862. Oil on board. Lent by Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. The Paul Mellon Collection, Photo: Katherine Wetzel. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

to, the dying young men whose last letters home he took down and sent: the infinite dead(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes exhalation in Natures chemistry distilld, and shall be so forever, in every future grain

of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)not only Northern dead leavening Southern soilthousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth. A number of painters bore witness to the war. Four painters whose works are not included in the exhibitionand whose impressions, both successful and less so, would have provided a useful counterpoint to wartime photographyare Louis Lang, Thomas Nast, James Walker, and William Washington. Their attempts to paint grand historical works in the immediate wake of events would have been worthwhile additions. Conrad Wise Chapmans Battery Bee, Dec. 3, 1863, at first glance, is a straightforward work depicting the
Timothy H. OSullivan (1840-1882), A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863. Albumen print. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk,Virginia. Museum purchase and partial gift of Carol L. Kaufman and Stephen C. Lampl in memory of their parents Helen and Carl Lampl.

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changing of the guard at a fortified position in Charleston Harbor, which was then being bombarded daily by Union ships. But despite the makeshift barracks and the lumpy redoubts, the tattered flag of the Confederacy flaps in the breeze in a sky worthy of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The work conveys steadfast pride and resilience as do all of Chapmans paintings in the exhibition. That reconciliation between the North and South would not be easy is perfectly captured in Winslow Homers Prisoners from the Front. Like Eastman Johnson, Homer appropriated the conventions of genre painting to advance a point of view, creating allegories that were implicit yet understood. In Prisoners from the Front, The expressions on the faces of the unrepentant Confederates, as Harvey writes, tell the hard truth. Overcoming the divide between Northern and Southern attitudes at the close of the

war would prove far harder than the conflict itself. Similarly, Johnsons A Ride for LibertyThe Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862 finds a black family in a gray dawn limbo. The freedom they race toward is only slightly brighter than the life they are fleeing. The husband and wife, Janus-like, gaze in two directions, caught between the past and the future, the known and unknown. At the last, Homers Cotton Pickers and The Veteran in a New Field encapsulate the ambiguities of postbellum America. In Cotton Pickers, the young woman, cotton clinging to her dress, pauses, thinking, dreaming. But of what? In The Veteran in a New Field, the farmer, a veteran by his clothes, mows his grain. Is he aware of the Grim Reaper irony his image presents? Is he remembering the war? The fallen? We do not see his face. Homer turns him away from us, leaves him with his thoughts, with

memories that we, perhaps, could not begin to understand. In subsequent wars, as realism seemed less and less capable of conveying the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare, artistsPicasso in Guernica, saywould explore new ways of expression, attempting to externalize these interior, psychological responses. But, given their training, given what they thought art was and was supposed to be and do, the artists of the Civil War left us with a rich legacy that reminds us that the history of art is history. America oscillates between individual freedom and equality, between our rights as citizens and our responsibilities as citizens. These, the twin pillars of our philosophy, are forces that strain for mastery in an eternal tug of war. Have they ever been in perfect balance? Can they be? Is our Civil War really over? Can it ever be?

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), A Coming Storm, 1863, retouched and redated in 1880. Oil on canvas, 28 x 42 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art: gift of the McNeil Americana Collection.
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