WHEN PAINTERS SHOWED THE WAR IN MORE THAN BLUE AND GRAY

c.2013 New York Times News Service

NEW YORK — If you’ve seen the awesome, soul-wrenching “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you might suppose that a second exhibition about the war would be redundant. It’s not. “The Civil War and American Art,” also at the Met, is a gripping show that sheds further light on how the nation experienced its fratricidal conflict. Organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it is not the broad survey its title suggests. It is a lean, pointedly selective show, consisting of about 60 paintings, from 1852 to 1877 — including outstanding works by Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford and Winslow Homer — and 18 photographs taken during the war.

Harvey’s thesis, which she lays out in an eloquent, book-length essay in the catalogue, is that European-type history painting, with its clear nationalistic and idealistic values, was inadequate to this war. She argues that reactions to its sobering realities and moral and political ambiguities were expressed most authentically in landscape and in anecdotal genre painting, as well as in photography. Many of the photographs in the exhibition, by Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and others, document battlefields strewn with swollen corpses. Exhibited in New York at the time, such images shocked the romance out of viewers.

Before the war, painters of the Hudson River School made landscape a vehicle for nationalistic myths and transcendental ideals. So it’s not too much of a stretch to read paintings here of dark storm clouds over peaceful waters (by Gifford and Martin Johnson Heade) as allegories about the coming of war. It is surprising, however, to learn that Church’s spectacular painting “Icebergs” (1861) was understood in its day as an expression of Union patriotism and abolitionism. Rhetoricians had identified the arctic north with the Union cause, and icebergs, drifting southward and eventually melting were seen as metaphors for the inevitable demise of slavery.

Another popular metaphor likened the institution of slavery to a smoking volcano threatening to explode the nation. So Harvey interprets Church’s big, lurid painting “Cotopaxi” (1862), in which a South American volcano erupts in the distance, as an expression of abolitionist sentiment. And she reads a third Church extravaganza, “Rainy Season in the Tropics” (1866), wherein a double rainbow arcs over a mountain gorge, as a symbol of hope for reunification and healing.

Among genre painters, Eastman Johnson gave pictures of ordinary life abolitionist inflections. “Negro Life at the South” (1859) depicts blacks relaxing in the shady, dirt backyard of a dilapidated house. Superficially it appears to be an idyllic vision of urban slave life. But, as Harvey points out, many details suggest otherwise. A pale-skinned woman in a voluminous gown entering from the right implies a more complex story having to do with relations between masters and slaves, miscegenation and light-skinned blacks passing for white.

Some artists witnessed the war up close. The exhibition includes small, finely observed paintings of military activities in camps, forts and other sites by Gifford, who served in the Union Army, and by Conrad Wise Chapman, a little-known, academically trained painter turned Confederate soldier.

Chapman’s works are fascinating and, in some ways, more informative than photography of the time could be, since they were in colour and could better convey a sense of movement. “Submarine Torpedo Boat H.L. Hunley Dec 6 1863” is a detailed picture of a metal submersible vessel on a dry dock. “Battery Simkins Feb 25 1864” shows soldiers in and around rough fortifications on the shore of Charleston Harbor, in South Carolina, reacting to a Union shell bursting in air an alarmingly short distance away.

But no artist went deeper into the heart of darkness than Winslow Homer. He was at the Union front for months on assignment for Harper’s Weekly, which published his drawings. He also made paintings that are as impressive for their sensuous beauty as they are for their realism and psychological acuity. “Sharpshooter” (1863), a study in suspenseful concentration, depicts from below a Union sniper seated on a fir tree branch, aiming his rifle at a distant target. A wall label notes that a skilled marksman could pick off a man as far as a mile away. Years later Homer recalled that what sharpshooters did struck him “as near to murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army.”

Homer’s “Home Sweet Home” (around 1863) is an apparently more relaxed painting of a couple of tired soldiers outside their tents watching a pot boil on a campfire under a sky of fair-weather clouds. In the middle distance light glints off the brass horns of a military band presumably playing the titular tune. Far away, across a river, there’s another encampment with campfire smoke drifting above it. A heartbreaking back story goes with this image. It had become a common practice when Union and Confederate troops happened to camp across rivers from each other for their bands to engage in musical exchanges. They would take turns playing their own favourites, eliciting cheers from both sides, and then the bands would play “Home Sweet Home” in unison. After one such interlude, a Confederate soldier wrote in his diary, “I do believe that had we not had the river between us that the two armies would have gone together and settled the war right there and then.”

Several of Homer’s paintings portray black people with extraordinary empathy and no false sentiment. Most painfully fraught of all is “A Visit From the Old Mistress” (1876), in which a grey-haired white woman in a black, lace-trimmed dress confronts three black women in worn clothes, one holding a small child. Arranged in a friezelike composition against a rustic wooden wall, the ex-slaves and their former owner gaze tensely at each other across what seems an unbridgeable chasm of suspicion and psychological wreckage. More than 125 years later, the image remains as trenchant as ever.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

“The Civil War and American Art” continues through Sept. 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.