In honor of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, faculty and students clustered in the Addison Gallery of American Art this past Tuesday to view its Civil War exhibition in a new light.
Christopher Jones, Instructor in History, and Jamie DeSimone, Assistant Curator at the Addison, hosted a gallery discussion to shed insight on the stories behind pieces in the new exhibit, The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues.
The exhibit features work by both historical artists, such as Winslow Homer and Alexander Gardner, and current artists, including Kara Walker and Sally Mann, all depicting scenes from Civil War battlefields.
In the gallery talk, DeSimone and Jones hoped to provide different views on the artwork, DeSimone, an art history perspective and Jones, a historical one.
The talk centered on varying controversies surrounding the Civil War art, including the representation of African Americans.
Jones said, “The [African-American population] is incredibly underrepresented in the documentation of the Civil War, even in the popular culture of the Civil War.” The Addison’s exhibit contains two pictures of free African Americans.
Pieces highlighted in the discussion include “Our Jolly Cook,” which portrays a cook entertaining officers at a military camp and “Baggage Train,” which depicts two men sitting on the back of a covered wagon. Both pieces are by Winslow Homer, a “journalistic artist,” who sketched images of the battlefields to be published in newspapers.
The pair also examined the work of Kara Walker, a modern African-American artist who addresses the problem of underepresentation in her prints. Walker takes Civil War drawings and superimposes dark silhouettes on top of them.
The silhouettes, portraying slaves, symbolize how their stories are often left untold in depictions of the Civil War.
DeSimone and Jones also spoke about the controversy surrounding Alexander Gardner’s photograph, titled “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg,” which depicts a fallen Confederate soldier lying next to his gun. Studies around thirty years go proved that Gardner’s photos were staged.
According to DeSimone, through photographic analysis, experts found that Gardner dragged the soldier in the photo from about forty yards away and turned his head towards the camera. A scholar also identified the gun in the photograph to be an infantry man’s musket, instead of a Charles Rifle, a telling inconsistency.
Gardner produced a book of the photographs taken during the Civil War, each accompanied by a description of the scene. Though these descriptions are now viewed as inaccurate, Gardner still accomplished showing the public how bloody and gruesome the war was.
DeSimone and Jones also discussed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and its effect on the war. The Addison has an original British copy of the book, which, in its first year of publication, sold 300 thousand copies.
The pair said Stowe was living in Cincinnati, Ohio when she came up with the idea for the book. Ohio was right on the border between slave and free states, and Stowe was helping slaves across the border. She then moved to Andover, where she lived on campus in Stowe House and was later buried in the campus cemetery.
The year Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, 1852, was also a very important election year. Jones wrote, “In the election of 1852, about 1.6 million votes were cast for the winner, Franklin Pierce (About 3 million votes were cast overall). About four or five copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold in the United States that year for each vote cast for Pierce.”
The novel shaped the presidential election of 1852 by bringing the issue of slavery to people’s attention and raising awareness for the abolitionist cause, which would also later affect the Civil War.
“[The narratives] would [have] the same [concept as the novel] but the slaves would be so happy and they would love their master,” said Jones.
DeSimone believed the discussion allowed viewers to look past the “documentation” style of the works and see what the artists intended with their pieces and what the pieces show about society at that time.
According to DeSimone, the Addison planned the exhibition over a year, and she began the necessary research while the Addison was undergoing renovations.
The Addison has about 200 works on the Civil War, but only 50 are displayed in the exhibit. The exhibit is divided into three galleries. One includes landscapes, one includes work depicting participants in the war, and the last shows a video by Kara Walker.
According to DeSimone, the Addison generally tries to host one public event for each of its exhibition. In the case of the Civil War exhibit, a gallery talk was ideal, as they could invite Jones, a specialist on the subject, to provide historical context.
