Silent Cries: A Look at the Influences on Art that impacted the United States Before, During, and After the War Aras Through Four Pictorial Portholes
History: it really is his-story. What better way to tell a story than to make sure there are pictures in it? After all, a “picture is worth a thousand words” as the adage goes. Paintings, statues, photos, even architecture, from a given time periods such as the early American Colonial days give new meaning to an event in history. On the flip side, knowing the historical background of a piece of art creates deeper meaning for it and makes its style, form, and purpose easier to understand. Art itself influences history. Think back to all the advertisements in magazines and how they influence the way consumers think about and act toward a product. Then take that thought a step further and think about how posters and images affected people’s attitudes toward political and social movements so dramatically in the seventies, and how they affect people even today when they are used to further disaster relief programs and the like. Art, in one sense, can change the course of history. Many times it has stirred up the fire of rebellion or the passionate love of freedom in people and sent them off to war. So it is a two-way street: history influences art, and art influences the course of history. This two-way street can clearly be seen in the art surrounding the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the two World Wars.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the opulent Rococo style reigned supreme in the art and architecture world. More florid and fanciful than the early Baroque style, Rococo was still full of ornamentation and swirls. As the time tables of history approached the then still unexpected American Revolution, a fascination with the classical world arose. This time was the age of enlightenment, and it saw a great rise of philosophers and other thinkers. In turn, artists looked for inspiration to classical models and paired down their work to show reflection, grace, heroism, and harmony. Another reaction to the over-the-top ornate look of Rococo art was the natural look that artists strove for in the early American Romantic movement. While artists still held to aristocratic tendencies when painting portraits of their great men and their families – John and Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and the Washington family – as if they were painting royalty with all the proper poses, American artists in the late eighteenth century added a natural element to their compositions. For example, while the Washington family was painted as if they were a royal family, John Singleton Copley painted his Paul Revere with the famed subject of this portrait looking at a silver teapot that he had crafted. Though Paul Revere is in a classic pose in the piece, the painting has a flavor of Naturalism. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages manual describes the reaction to Rococo this way: “For Rousseau [who attacked the ornamental French society of the early eighteenth century] its [the Rococo society’s] “statues and pictures” were “representative of vice, every perfersion of heart and mind.” The views of Rousseau, widely read and popular, were largely responsible for the turning away from the Rococo and the formation of a taste for the “natural,” as opposed to the artificial,” (898).
Added to the revolt against Rococo in America there was the need for propaganda for the uniting of the colonies and, later, the fighting of the Revolutionary War. It was through this propaganda art that art was able to help change history. Paul Revere, a well known as well as a wealthy silver smith in Boston. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made famously clear in his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Revere was a very patriotic man. Not only did he risk life and limb to warn the Minute Men militia as well as fight himself in the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere helped to create propaganda for the war effort. Pictures like his helped to muster American spirit and give the colonial people the will to fight a much larger and more experienced country. His depiction of the Boston Massacre was one such powerful piece of propaganda.
The Boston Massacre, which was rather misnamed, was really just the provoked shooting of five Americans. A crowd of protesters had gathered around a few British soldiers and had been pelting them with snowballs, some of which had rocks in them, and sticks. The British soldiers kept their cool and were remarkably self restrained. That is, they were that way until someone rose a cry for “fire,” for there was a fire nearby. However, the soldiers thought that they were being commanded to fire on the rioting Americans. When the red coats shot into the crowded they killed and seriously wounded five people. The Americans took up the cry of murder and held a trial, at which John Adams the future president defended the British soldiers. Before the Boston Massacre, had come the Stamp Act and then the Boston Tea Party, so there was a lot of anti-British sentiment in the colonies, especially in Boston. Calling the accidental shootings the Boston Massacre was the perfect propaganda move, as it gave the American people one more thing to avenge themselves on the British for. The woodcut of the Boston Massacre that Paul Revere made let the picture be printed in papers and pamphlets. It was a well received picture, and it helped to incense the colonies to war.
Before the American Civil War, in the early nineteenth century, came the popularization of photography. The Big Book of Art, states that, “The invention of photography challenged artists to find new ways of expressing their ideas and offered them both assistance and inspiration. . .Painters were. . .fascinated by what a photograph could capture. Early cameras required a long exposure, so anything that moved would appear blurred, or would leave a ghost image on the photograph. The crowds in Claude Monet’s bustling street scenes are indistinct, while the foliage in Camille Corot’s romantic landscapes is slightly out of focus, as if gently stirring in the breeze,” (236). So, in the nineteenth century, photography helped to create two artistic movements: Realism and Impressionism. Realism was inspired by the incredible detail that a photograph could capture. Artists tried to reproduce this with their brushes. They attempted to take their emotions and their personal slant out of the picture and portray exactly what they saw in exact detail, like a photograph. Impressionists, though, wanted to put the feeling and movement into paintings that photographs removed from pictures. As photographs became the more common way to record facts and details, painters leaned more towards creating atmosphere, mood, and emotion in their paintings, whether that was a somber mood or a flurry of exciting emotions.
It was during this period of art when photography was beginning to shape the course of art, that the American Civil War added its own shade of influence on American art. One Civil War painter who captured the Civil War with feeling and meaning while the cameras captured the factual detail of the battlefield was Winslow Homer. Winslow Homer, who was born in 1836, entered the world as photography was in the very beginning stages of changing the history of art the world over. He started off his artistic career when he began to work as commercial illustrator. Then he picked up oil painting and began to create studio painting. Homer grew up, thrived, and worked in an era where values were “old fashioned,” families were important, war was foreign and distant to the American people, and national suffering was limited. He also grew up and worked in a time in which Realism gave way to Impressionism, both of which were still considered fresh and new movements.
During the beginning of his career, Winslow Homer worked as an artist-correspondent – a pictorial journalist. It was during this time that he worked at or near the front lines of the bloody and horrific battles that he gathered information, scenes, and emotions to help him create his famous Civil War paintings. In 1866, just one year after the war ended, Winslow Homer completed his oil painting “Prisoners From the Front,” which established his reputation as a Civil War painter.
Homer drew this painting from an actual event, when a Union general captured several confederate prisoners. After watching almost four long, drawn out years of a bloody war that was literally in some cases between brother, it is interesting that Homer did not depict bloody battle scenes or daring charges. He did not show the gargantuan loss of life or miserable conditions in which the men lived. Rather, Homer injected a much needed atmosphere of nobility into this scene. In this painting “Prisoners from the Front,” Winslow Homer made both the Union general and soldier as well as the captured Confederate men look noble, human, and dignified. In this painting Homer reflected the country’s sentiment that the war was not a glorious thing. Yet, he gave the country a needed reminder that while the South was captured by the North, both the Southern boys and the Northern lads were noble and deserving of respect. Homer’s gentle, respectful, and almost loving treatment of his subjects is one reason why this painting had such great appeal to the public from the time it was unveiled.
Until World War II American artists were not included in the big, important art galleries in American cities. Rather, those galleries displayed works by prominent European artists. This was one of the biggest reasons that American artists modeled their works and judged their works by what was produced by the European masters. Just before World War I began, Fauvism and Cubism broke upon the European and the American public. These were slightly disturbing art trends for the general populace at first. After all, World War I had not begun yet to shake the whole world and make the younger generations look for something new and exciting to make them forget that they had become the “Lost Generation.” In America, this time right before World War I was still racked with the problems that the Civil War had not been able to resolve: namely, what to do about the “race problem”. Controversy was a way of life for many Americans, and it certainly became a way of life for American artists. People were also become socially conscious in other ways. They were noticing and recognizing the problems in their own city streets that were not caused by race but were rather caused by poverty. An entire school of art was formed and fueled by this new social consciousness. It was called the Ashcan School of art, and it derived its name from the poverty, squalor, and true depictions that it encompassed. The Ashcan School of art was part of the American Realist movement that tried to depict life as it really was instead of in a constantly idealized, serene, and false way. The pictures produced in the Ashcan School, all of which usually depict the streets and slums of New York City, included both photographs and paintings.
There is one important American artist who was not a part of the American Realist movement, not a part of the Ashcan School, nor a part of any other particular movement. This artist portrayed the intimate and personal lives of women, lives that were for the most part hidden from public view. While this artist did not ascribe to any particular movement, she reflected societies growing interest in women’s concerns and the growth of the Feminist movement, or the “Women’s Movement” as it was called at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her name was Mary Cassatt.
The biggest impact that World War I had on America was opening the country to more influence by Europe. This influence is shown in Mary Cassatt’s mature work by the Impressionistic style that she employed to portray the emotion and gentleness and the nurturing nature of her subjects. The picture “Nurse Reading to a Little Girl” is an excellent example of Mary Cassatt’s intimate pictures of the lives of the women of her time:
After World War I the country was experiencing cultural growing pains. Flappers danced to jazz, speakeasies popped up in back allies and more prominent city streets, and the Hollywood-famous mobsters popped up in big cities across the country. Then World War II came. This war, with its terrible death toll, changed the world even more then the last war. A new world order was ushered in. There were more definitive boundaries drawn between the east and the west in Europe with the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Daily life was no longer the same struggle that it has been during the depression, so there was more financial stability and a sense of security in that way. However, there was much more cultural instability. World War II had completely shocked the nation. In fact, it had put the entire world in a state of shock. This was shown in the art that arose. Even just before the war the new science of psychoanalysis had begun to inspire artists to create and paint abstract and unusual works that drifted through their own imagination and that they felt had deeper meaning (Collins Big Book of Art, 302). After the war, with their lives and their homes and their cultures torn apart, people began to search for new meaning. They looked for new symbols and new ideas that would be relevant to the new world order and that would help them to either explain or ignore the tragedy that had just taken place.
Surrealism, American Religionism, and Abstraction flourished. Each one was an expression of the culture’s psychological turmoil and exploration. One movement that arose and took hold in America was Pop Art. Pop Art, which came into prominence in the 1950s in the US, challenged the idea of what was considered fine art. It appealed to the common man since its images were drawn from current marketing and advertising mediums, such as posters, magazines, and other adds. One of the most definitive artists in the pop art field was Andy Warhol. He turned labels, cans, and other humdrum items that were cast aside and received no attention into a form of art.
Warhol also painted celebrities in a comic book style with dots of color that mimicked the way in which the ink was transferred to the paper of comic books.
People in America responded to this Pop Art because it elevated ordinary things in their lives into something that became an accepted art form and image of their culture. During the years after World War II, people just wanted to go back to ordinary, everyday life.
Throughout the ages, in every period of time, history has had a huge hand in shaping and determining art. In fact, it is almost possible to say that history has always defined art – what is considered art at the time, what purpose art has served – plus served as an inspiration for art. Also, art has helped to shape history. It is through art that we can see the fashions of other cultures, the religious importance of emperors from centuries gone by, the elaborate celebrations and parades of ancient and even more modern cultures, and the formal customs of other peoples. Modern men and women walking through art galleries can see the loneliness of the princesses of the Spanish court or glimpse the serenity of a Dutch made as she pours out a bowl full of milk. Art has influenced history in another way: through propaganda and the feeding of movements. This can be seen the world over, in any culture. In America however, this dual influence, this two-way street, can be seen more than it can be in most other countries for advertising became a form of art after the first World War especially. This kind of artistic advertising was also a form of cultural documentation – it is still a form of cultural documentation. A study of the ties between history, society, culture, and art is fascinating.
Works Cited
“Andy Warhol”. Wikipedia. Web.
“The Boston Massacre”. Image.
“Campbell Soup.” Image.
The Collin’s Big Book of Art: From Cave Art to Pop Art. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.
“Marilyn.” Image.
“Mary Cassatt”. Wikipedia. Web.
“Nurse Reading to a Little Girl.” Image.
“Prisoners From the Front.” Image.
“Self Portrait.” Mary Cassatt. Image.
Tansey, Richard G. and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Tenth Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1996. Print.
