Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War.

By Eric Foner, Kirk Savage, Angela Miller, Steven Conn, Andrew Walker, and Margaret Rose Vendryes. Introduction by Andrew Walker and Clare Kunny. Museum Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, c. 2001. Pp. 104. Paper, $15.00, ISBN 0-86559-186-5.)

This volume consists of essays that originated from a lecture series at the Art Institute of Chicago that accompanied a 1999 exhibition of the same name. Despite the breadth suggested by its monumental title, this published volume consists of a small number of contributions that focus on different, particular topics. Fortunately, the essays are well written and beautifully illustrated, and each makes a valuable contribution to American cultural history.

Eric Foner's opening essay stands out for its broad scope and its historical (as opposed to its art-historical) nature. Foner restates some of the arguments that appeared in his book The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998). Like this earlier book, his contribution here is intriguing and challenging, but in the context of the other essays--which look at art almost exclusively from the perspective of the North--it is of limited use as an analytic tool. Historical and artistic evidence, including the imagery reproduced throughout the volume, suggests that American blacks and northern whites shared a general understanding of what freedom meant. Sculptures of emancipation, portraits of Union soldiers, images of escaping slaves, and painted scenes of battlefield valor were not as problematic, contested, or shifting in meaning for Yankee viewers as one might suppose from the arguments of Foner or the other authors (Savage, Conn, and Walker) who explicitly support his thesis. To maintain that contemporaries were confused about the nature of the concept of freedom clouds our understanding of the powerful imagery produced by northern artists of the Civil War era.

Kirk Savage's essay throws light on John Quincy Adams Ward's The Freedman (1863), a bronze sculpture inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation. Savage demonstrates that the sculpture was unusual in showing a black man liberated from slavery without the presence of a "white savior" (p. 31). The absence of an emancipator and the heroic pose of the figure made Ward's sculpture a peculiar and bold invention at a time when "the standard image of Emancipation" (p. 37) was found in works like Thomas Ball's Freedman's Memorial to Lincoln (1876; Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.), which shows a black freedman crouching gratefully beneath the standing Lincoln. In her contribution, Angela Miller explores the aesthetic intentions behind Albert Bierstadt's Mountain Brook (1863), seeing this landscape painting as an imagined "retreat" from difficult times (p. 40). Steven Conn and Andrew Walker analyze "history painting" (p. 61) that sought to record events of the Civil War. They note that history painting was already on the wane by the 1860s, upstaged by the painting of nature. The moral struggles of wartime sometimes produced turgid sentiments that found expression in American landscape art, although Conn and Walker prudently caution against seeing the shadow of war in every painted stormy sky. Finally, Margaret Rose Vendryes discusses the life and art of Robert S. Duncanson, the "preeminent black American landscape painter" of nineteenth-century America (p. 82). Among other insights, she convincingly argues against seeing too much racial content in Duncanson's landscapes. Vendryes's study rounds out a collection of well- presented essays that, even apart from the context of the exhibition that inspired them, stand as useful additions to the literature on this period.

JOSEPH MANCA

Rice University