The Civil War and American Art

Harvey's (chief curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum; An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection) extensive catalog assesses the impact of a national cataclysm—the American Civil War—on landscape, genre painting, and the then-new medium of photography. Other than Winslow Homer, not many artists have been studied in relation to the war's impact on their work. Here Harvey looks closely at works created between the late 1850s and the centennial year 1876 to demonstrate how the conflict shaped visual culture even when it was not its direct subject matter. Although photographers brought the battlefield to civilians in ways not previously possible, no great historical paintings emerged from the carnage. And although abolition and emancipation were topics of visual interest in many media, in the end American artists turned away from an antebellum focus on nationality and towards a postwar interest in cosmopolitism, and particularly the Paris-centered contemporary-European art world.