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The Civil War and American Art by Eleanore Jones Harvey

2014; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nyh.2014.0010

2328-8132

Debra Jackson,

Photography and Visual Culture

660 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The Civil War and American Art. By Eleanore Jones Harvey. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012, 352 pages, $75.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Debra Jackson, Independent Scholar Museum exhibitions devoted to the American Civil War and its aftermath are rare. The 1995 exhibition America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War was the first of its kind and a groundbreaking achievement. Curated by Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, the exhibition presented a revised scholarly assessment of Reconstruction to a wider audience using objects of material culture. Civil War and American Art War by Eleanore Jones Harvey, a catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, is an important work in the same vein, a visual narrative of the issues that defined America’s disastrous upheaval. The exhibition catalogue is organized thematically. In five essays, Harvey explains how artists represented the revolutionary changes wrought during the war and how American art, in turn, was transformed by that event. Harvey is an accomplished stylist and she crafts each essay with a precision that makes for fascinating reading. “Landscapes and the Metaphorical War” examines landscape painting during the antebellum years when the “wilderness aesthetic” of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole held sway. This uniquely American philosophy espoused “nature as sanctuary ,” and the Hudson River School tradition remained a dominant force in works by the successive generation of artists that rose to prominence following Cole’s death in 1848. Harvey draws the reader forward to the eve of the Civil War, when landscapists gradually moved towards a different mode of painting, one that “infused their images with a sense of the nation’s growing turmoil,” (23) as seen in the darkly somber landscapes of Fredric Edwin Church and the thunderstorm paintings of Martin Johnson Heade. The author’s command of her subject is especially evident in a discussion of the atmospheric and meteorological phenomena—visible up and down the Atlantic seaboard and as far west as Cincinnati, OH and St. Louis, MO—that occurred in the summer and early fall of 1860. Harvey notes that accounts of the “eerie” celestial activity filled the newspapers. With great skill, she intertwines the reactions and analysis of poets, nov- Book Reviews 661 elists, preachers to demonstrate that landscapists like Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Robinson Gifford and others, proved through their work that landscape painting could represent the deepest of human emotions. By the war’s end, the antebellum notion of nature as sanctuary was destroyed. By then a new aesthetic inspired paintings ; it showed nature as vulnerable but still providing “a place in which God’s grace might still operate while America recovered from the effects” of the conflict (71). ”The Art of Wartime Photography” is as deftly argued as the first essay, and conveys the power of the visceral responses provoked by battlefield photography. Noting that three major firms —Brady Studios of New York, Gardner Studios of Washington, D.C. and E. and H.T. Anthony & Co. of New York— controlled the dissemination of images, Harvey moves to analyze the war’s most talented photographers. She focuses on the three that “stand out as having changed the way war was understood and the way it was depicted”: Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner and George Barnard. One of her most fascinating insights is the distinction between the artistic sensibilities of Brady and Gardner, noting that Brady “favored a metaphorical approach to the ravages of war, in keeping with the prevailing aesthetics of landscape painting” while Gardner, a committed abolitionist, focused his lens on dead soldiers and thereby “reflected his own regard for the price these men paid to achieve the war’s goals” (84–5). Equally powerful are George Barnard’s “brutalized landscape” images. In these, Barnard focuses on ruined cityscapes, houses and churches disfigured by artillery shell fire in Georgia and South Carolina. Barnard’s work shows, with unflinching clarity, the “dismantling of Southern society and Southern identity” (110). Having first introduced landscape painting, Harvey concludes this second essay on photography by inviting the reader to consider the artists and their chosen forms of artistic expression together. Afterwards, readers will be convinced that photography...