The artistic legacy of the American Civil War

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Patricia Andrew reviews an important book, written to accompany a major exhibition showing in Washington and New York

The American Civil War was first modern war. It was also the first to be recorded in a comprehensive photographic record, as well as in traditional artistic means, and painters and draughtsmen were aware from the start that they had a visual rival. It provided them with a challenge, which they rose to by using their time-honoured media in a very modern way, with dashing, hasty sketches, and with an aim of documenting rather than glorifying the conflict.

Particularly noticeable is the interest in the realities of the hum-drum daily life of soldiers. Jones Harvey emphasises this from the start: the image on the cover shows a detail from an oil painting, depicting a soldier hanging out a line of washing on his tent. It is a far cry from the paintings of idealized men standing in heroic, classical poses in dramatic settings on the battlefield, which had characterized European art for centuries – and which continued to do so, to some extent, until the First World War.

Another important aspect of the art of this war is that much of it was made while the outcome of the conflict was still unclear. Previously, sketches and notes made on the spot had usually been developed at a later date into paintings that reflected victory or heroic defeat. But now artists were documenting ‘war in progress’, recording the uncertainty of the here and now. It made for immediacy, and a set of very personal dramas, despite the fact that the action was taking place across a large geographical area.

A thoughtful Introduction to the book puts the paintings, particularly the landscapes, in historical context. The first chapter is on ‘Landscapes and the Metaphorical War’ – and what metaphors there are, from the urbanized areas of the East to the great wilderness of un-Europeanized America, regarded in turn as both virginal and innocent, and wild and dangerous.  ‘The Art of Wartime Photography’ covers less original art-historical ground; in comparison with the paintings, this has been much more extensively written about already. But it still has the power to shock: Alexander Gardner’s images of dead at Antietam heaped in a ditch, and Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s, of bodies spread on a gentle grassy field at Gettysburg, linger in the mind.  

My only criticism of this otherwise excellent study is that the work of Roger Fenton – the British photographer who had documented the Crimean war just a few years earlier – is dismissed so summarily at the beginning of the study. Fenton was a real pioneer, and although he concentrated his efforts on showing the logistics of transport and difficult terrain (rather than photographing death), he nevertheless did open eyes with the novelty of his photographic evidence, showing the grubbiness of war, its difficulties and its aftermath.

The most impressive chapter is ‘The Human Face of War’, where we see individual soldiers as the subject of artistic study: guerrilla warfare, a sharp-shooter up a tree, a soldier surrendering, and another meditating beside a grave. These are ‘vignettes’ of war, modern in their immediacy, depicting the way that individuals behave in specific circumstances.

The chapter on ‘Abolition and Emancipation’ shows the cringe-making idealisation of many early depictions of African Americans, the emancipation of the painter’s view of people as people, and examines the extent to which artists really moved on.

A huge range of work was created before, during, and after this war, which changed artists’ attitudes as much as it changed their method and speed of working. The book includes numerous quotations from those who experienced it first-hand, and extracts from the work of literary figures such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. These writers realized how difficult it was to truly capture the experience of war. But as the author of this book, Eleanor Jones Harvey, notes:

The Civil War had a profound and lasting impact on American art, as it did on American culture as a whole. Both genre painting and landscape painting were fundamentally altered by the war and its aftermath. 

Harvey is chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and this is the latest in her studies of early American art. It brings the academic study of the subject up to date, and re-balances the topic with its wide-ranging enquiry into the origins and outcomes of this mass artistic experience.

The book accompanies a major exhibition (and provides a summary catalogue of the exhibits) but is written to stand alone as a study for long-term use. It provides a full bibliography of the topics under discussion (and a well-organized index) and should become a standard reference of the topic. And like its subject, it is very large and weighty, and will always make its presence felt on any bookshelf.

The Civil War and American Art  by Eleanor Jones Harvey is published by Yale University Press 2013. 317pp.103 colour and 110 mono illus. ISBN: 0300187335