The Civil War and American Art
2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jat389
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoArt historians have long pondered the question of why so few American artists celebrated the Civil War in the stirring and theatrical grand manner of the European history painting tradition. Compounding the puzzle is the fact that so many painters continued to produce landscapes and scenes of daily life just as they had in peacetime, as if the war were no more than a blip on their aesthetic radar. Photography, it seemed, was the sole medium capable of exposing the harsh truth of modern warfare. Among painters, only the New Englander Winslow Homer had the genius to represent the war in a new deadpan style that conveyed unglamorous realities. But interpretations have changed. Over the last two decades, scholars have steadily chipped away at those truisms to reveal a much more complicated story. Eleanor Jones Harvey's hefty exhibition catalog, The Civil War and American Art, makes a substantial contribution to this revisionist enterprise. Harvey builds on recent art historical scholarship to argue that far from being escapist and willfully oblivious, wartime painters conveyed “the emotional and spiritual significance of the war” in landscapes freighted with portentous meteorological symbolism (p. 3). Martin Johnson Heade's 1859 Approaching Thunderstorm, for example, is no mere tempest but a harbinger of the crisis to come. Perceptive viewers, Harvey argues, often saw parallels among such paintings, current events, and their own religious views. Here as elsewhere, she supports her claims by utilizing contemporary prose and (especially) poetry, where the same metaphors were constantly at play.
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