Monuments to the Lost Cause Women Art and the Landscapes Pdf
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Confederate Monuments: Southern Heritage or Southern Art?
The future of Amalgamated monuments in the American memorial landscape is uncertain. Since the Charleston church shooting in June 2015, there take been increasing calls to remove all symbols of Amalgamated retentiveness from American public spaces. Amalgamated monuments have been bodily hauled to the ground in acts of iconoclasm, tagged with graffiti connecting them with the Black Lives Matter motion, removed or relocated through legal channels, and recontextualized with text linking them with the history of racial injustice in America. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, Amalgamated heritage organizations have defended the monuments every bit key symbols of Southern history and have lobbied to protect them from alteration through legal means. Many state legislatures take passed laws protecting the monuments from alteration, but these laws are also facing legal challenges on constitutional grounds. Public debate has centered on what to do with the monuments: whether to keep them up or take them down, and whether amending them with additional text or art might mitigate their power. Merely this essay will center on a different set of questions: what role do these monuments play in the field of Southern art? How do they contribute to a regional creative identity, and how should their position equally Southern artworks touch on their future fate? In seeking an answer, this essay will explore the conditions nether which the monuments were manufactured, their claims of Southern heritage, and their relationship with other forms of Southern public fine art. Ultimately, it is clear that these works exercise not represent the lived feel of all Southerners, and that there may be other types of work past Southern artists that would better represent the region.
In order to understand the condition of Confederate monuments inside Southern art, it is necessary to consider their origins. In the wake of the American Civil War, which toll the lives of an estimated 750,000 soldiers, including both Marriage and Amalgamated fatalities, and acquired untold damage to civilian lives and holding, communities beyond the nation began to cock monuments to the conflict. In the North, this procedure began almost immediately, with monuments honoring both the rank and file soldiers and the war's armed services and political leaders. But in the South, memorialization proceeded more slowly. The region had been decimated by war, and communities put their scant resources toward rebuilding lost infrastructure rather than erecting expensive monuments. And in the first years afterwards the end of the war, honoring the Confederacy with triumphal monuments was politically risky as former rebels looked to regain their public status within a reunified nation. With political concerns in mind, most memorializing efforts were carried out past Ladies' Memorial Associations, groups of elite women who organized the reburial of the Confederate dead in special cemeteries and commissioned pocket-size monuments in their honor. But with the end of Reconstruction, equally white Northerners gave up on reinforcing respect for the Spousal relationship and civil rights for all, Confederate monuments grew more numerous and more elaborate. The majority of these monuments were erected between almost 1890 and 1920, one of the darkest periods for race relations in the South.1
Most Confederate monuments were not manufactured by Southern artists. Due to the lack of an established public sculpture tradition or the necessary industrial infrastructure to produce fine art bronze, Southern monument committees had to await outside the region for sources of sculpture. Many soldier statues were manufactured by Italian carvers who churned out Confederate statues in white marble. Others were the products of large Northern firms, such as the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, that sold their replicated soldiers in trade catalogues. In many cases, statues sourced outside the region were placed on bases carved out of local rock and marketed by local firms: the Muldoon Monument Company of Lexington, Kentucky, and the McNeel Marble Works of Marietta, Georgia, were both successful with this model (fig. ane). In iconography, Amalgamated statues also borrowed from their Northern counterparts: like Union monuments, well-nigh Confederate statues feature soldiers standing at some grade of parade rest. And in costume, they tended either to be indistinguishable from their Spousal relationship counterparts—wearing a long overcoat and a kepi—or befitting to the type popularized by the Monumental Bronze Company, with a brusk crush jacket and slouch hat (fig. two). In form and manufacture, these statues reflect both the national and international nature of the postbellum memorial landscape.2
Fig. one. Muldoon Monument Company (base of operations) and Carlo Nicoli (figure), Bibb Canton Confederate Monument, 1878. Carrara marble and Georgia granite, 42 ft. high. Macon, GA. Photograph by the writer, Apr 2012
Fig. two. Monumental Bronze Visitor, Tyrrell County Confederate Monument, 1902. Zinc, 18 ft. high. Columbia, NC. Photograph by the writer, April 2012
I of the few Confederate soldier monuments to exist carved entirely in the South in the nineteenth century met with a humiliating terminate. The Elbert Canton Confederate Monument, the work of High german-American carver Peter Arthur Beiter, was unveiled in 1898 in Elberton, Georgia, to firsthand and intense criticism. Born in Ohio to German language immigrant parents in 1867, Beiter traveled south sometime in the 1890s and was involved in carving the base for some other Amalgamated statue in Cuthbert, Georgia, before receiving what was probable his kickoff commission for a full-length statue in Elberton.3 But the resulting monument was a disaster: locals hated its ponderous form, Yankee overcoat, and unsettling, startled expression, and they gave it the nickname "Dutchy" every bit a nod to its German beginnings. On August 13, 1900, a mob attacked the statue in the middle of the night and brought it to the basis, breaking information technology into several pieces. The next day, the townspeople buried it where it lay, facedown as a traitor to the Confederacy. In the 1980s, the statue was exhumed, and it now lies on its back on a gurney at the Elberton Granite Museum, enshrined as 1 of the showtime products of the boondocks's successful granite industry (fig. three). Information technology has been replaced in the town square by one of the mass-produced statues of the Monumental Bronze Visitor—an embarrassment of local manufacture exchanged for a sleek Yankee interloper.4
Fig. 3. Peter Arthur Beiter, Elbert County Amalgamated Monument, 1898. Elberton blueish granite, approx. 82 1/2 10 31 1/2 x 9 1/four in. Elberton Granite Museum, Elberton, GA. Photograph by the author, April 2012
Many of the Due south'due south nigh iconic monuments to military and political leaders of the Confederacy were also manufactured outside the region. A major equestrian monument was an expensive investment, and the first examples did non appear until well subsequently the end of Reconstruction. Two of the most discussed monuments to Robert E. Lee, located in Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, are both at the center of highly contested public debates on whether they should remain in the public heart. Richmond's monument was sculpted by Antonin Mercié after an intense artistic competition, and was cast in Paris nether his management (fig. 4). The commission chosen to judge the competition consisted of architect Edward Clark and sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, all Northerners and highly respected professionals. The Richmond Lee Monument was the kickoff to be placed on the storied Monument Avenue, which became one of the key Southern examples of the City Beautiful Move.5 As well linked with that movement is the Robert Due east. Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, the planned removal of which was the goad for the deadly Unite the Right rally in August 2017 (fig. five). Charlottesville's statue was begun by New York City–born sculptor Henry Shrady, who is best known for the Ulysses Due south. Grant Memorial in front of the United States Capitol. The statue was completed by Italian immigrant Leo Lentelli after Shrady's death.vi
Fig. four. Antonin Mercié and Paul Pujol, Robert East. Lee Monument, unveiled 1890. Bronze, granite, and marble, 61 ft. high. Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA. Photograph by the author, April 2012
Fig. five. Henry Shrady and Leo Lentelli, Robert E. Lee Monument, unveiled 1924. Bronze and granite, 26 ft. loftier. Charlottesville, VA. Photograph past the author, April 2018
Non all Confederate monuments were sculpted by artists from exterior the South, all the same. Edward Valentine and Moses Ezekiel were both Richmond-born sculptors and prominent in the field of Confederate retentiveness. Ezekiel served in the Amalgamated regular army, while Valentine spent the war years studying sculpture in Europe. Returning to Virginia in 1865, Valentine distinguished himself as a sculptor of Confederate subjects, including the gisant covering Lee's tomb in Lexington, Virginia, a statue of Lee that is at present in the Us Capitol Statuary Hall, and the monuments to Jefferson Davis and Matthew Fontaine Maury on Monument Avenue (fig. half-dozen).7 Equally for Ezekiel, after his stint in the Confederate ground forces, he left America, offset for Berlin, so for Rome, where he lived for the rest of his life. Over the course of his career, he was knighted in Italian republic and Germany and received many prestigious honors for his art. His near famous Confederate monument is the colossal statuary memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, commissioned after the establishment of a special department of the cemetery for the Confederate expressionless in the wake of the Spanish-American State of war.8 Both Valentine and Ezekiel lived cosmopolitan lives, taking advantage of the all-time artistic grooming and facilities for producing sculpture across the United States and in Europe. Like the soldier monuments ordered from international manufacturers, their work reflects the global scope of sculptural knowledge and materials brought to impact mail service-Ceremonious State of war commemorative activities.
Fig. 6. Edward 5. Valentine, Recumbent Lee, 1871–75. Marble, 100 one/ii in. long. Lee Chapel, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA. Photo by the writer, October 2016
With this history in mind, let us turn to an cess of Confederate monuments within the field of Southern art. Confederate monuments are cosmopolitan works, made by sculptors and artisans from within and outside the region. Their visual language comes from Greek and Roman sources filtered through the Neoclassicism of European and American sculptors in the nineteenth century. And however, they have been claimed today as key markers of white Southern heritage and culture. The women of the Ladies' Memorial Associations and, later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, took ownership of the monuments every bit one facet of their highly successful campaign to replace the truth of the Ceremonious War with the myth of the Lost Crusade. Like the aristocracy adult female reading the funeral rite for William Latané in the A. Thousand. Campbell engraving of William D. Washington'due south pop painting, they centered their histories of the monuments on their own agency in commissioning them.9 When looking into the annal to learn about the origin of a item Confederate soldier monument, information almost the artist or manufacturer tin sometimes exist difficult to find. Oft an account will include the names of the women involved in fundraising for the monument, the methods they used to heighten the money and the amounts they procured, and the ceremonies they enacted in order to dedicate information technology. As for the monument itself, accounts might specify just "an Italian sculptor," or in the case of Northern monument firms such as the Awe-inspiring Statuary Company, no information at all.10 For Southern women's organizations, so, the human activity of commissioning and dedicating a monument was significantly more important than the facts of its creation. It should therefore not be surprising to see the monuments folded into the neo-Confederate mythmaking that has resulted from the spread of Lost Cause ideology, which recasts the Civil War from a conflict fought to preserve slavery into a battle for states' rights fought past an agrarian S against Northern industrial power.11
Just it is also important to call up that Confederate monuments exercise not stand for the history or heritage of all Southerners or all Americans. As recent protests accept emphasized, Confederate monuments are conspicuously implicated in the history of slavery leading upwards to the Civil War and the violence and terrorism of Reconstruction, both of which fuel continued racial persecution against black Americans today. Virtually of these monuments were built betwixt the 1890s and the 1920s, when race relations in the Southward were at their worst and violence directed toward black Americans was at its highest signal. And the siting of Confederate monuments in front of the canton courthouse makes this connectedness explicit: these spaces were implicated in the violence of lynching, a terroristic act perpetrated to suppress all who opposed white supremacist rule. That profound injustice is clearly linked to continued injustices that disproportionately touch on black Americans today, including mass incarceration and the police violence that is central to the Black Lives Matter movement. Confederate soldier monuments have long been associated with political and racial power structures that perpetuate violence against black bodies, and the recent debate over their future makes this clan clear.12
Just equally the ideology of the Confederate monument does not correspond all Southerners, its form fails to reflect the folk visual tradition that is 1 of the region'due south groovy strengths. Confederate monuments are variations on a fairly narrow theme: the exalted man figure on a pedestal. Whether equestrian statues of military leaders, continuing portraits of politicians, or soldiers at parade residual, they follow a conventional formula handed downwards from ancient classical tradition. They communicate power and take up virtually of the primal spaces in the public landscape. But during the same time period in which Confederate monuments take come to boss borough spaces, African American Southern artists accept developed an extraordinary artistic tradition using the materials and spaces bachelor to them. From the chiliad shows of artists such as Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley to the quilts of Gee's Bend, these artists have forged a vital visual linguistic communication that rivals any modern art movement inside the mainstream art globe. Denied access to public space and prestigious art training, they take used found objects and privately endemic land to build worlds for their art. Joe Minter'due south African Village in America in Birmingham, Alabama, is one of the few extant examples of the 1000 bear witness, a tradition that flourished in the Deep South in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.13 Minter continues to add to his environment, which includes many monuments to the darker moments in American history, from slavery and lynching to contempo tragedies such as 9/eleven and the Sandy Hook Massacre.14 Yard shows are dying out due to the crumbling of the generation that produced them, instances of aggressive zoning, the incursions of the fine art marketplace, and other factors. But these spaces offer an alternative to the sterile Confederate monument. Different the traditional monument, which presents as an unchanging and unchangeable edifice, vernacular installations are constantly in flux. Their creators add and remove material, and individual elements intermission downwards with exposure to weather and fourth dimension. Pregnant is unstable, and at that place is ever room to add new context or ideas. If the Confederate monument is intended to communicate an inflexible interpretation of history, the thousand show allows for dash, improvisation, and risk.
Fig. seven. Dave Loewenstein, Defunct Monument I: Racism, 2018. Drawing and digital media on newspaper, prototype courtesy of the creative person
Some of that improvisational spirit has already fabricated itself evident in spaces where Confederate monuments have been removed. In places such as Durham (North Carolina), Baltimore, and New Orleans, the empty plinths have get charged spaces for a unlike grade of remembrance. These unoccupied pedestals tug at the mind in a way that a whole monument might non, calling attention to the existence of an interpretation of history that the community has decided to retire. In Durham, the granite base of the statue pulled down just days subsequently the Charlottesville riot remains in limbo. North Carolina state police prohibits any alteration to monuments on public belongings, even those that have been partially destroyed due to acts of iconoclasm. And then the pedestal sits, asking for intervention. On at least two carve up occasions, artists have installed guerrilla monuments on the base in place of the Confederate statue in the expressionless of night: a heart shape last August, and a thicket of defiantly raised fists in November.15 Empty plinths in other cities accept also become targets for graffiti and other extralegal installations. Possibly there is a way forrad in which these unsettling objects could become a counter-monument, a celebration of the resistance against Confederate ideology.
Several artists take besides imagined one other powerful force that could overtake the Confederate monument: kudzu. This invasive vine, native to Asia, was introduced to the American Southeast in 1883 and has gained a reputation as "the vine that ate the Southward." Fast-growing and hard to eradicate, kudzu exists simultaneously as a nightmare and a source of regional pride. In 2017, Dave Loewenstein, a muralist and printmaker based in Lawrence, Kansas, made a series of postcards for "defunct monuments," in which he imagined the vine consuming monuments associated with racism, materialism, and militarism (fig. seven).16 Loewenstein's postcard shows the at present-removed monument to Jefferson Davis in New Orleans completely obscured by kudzu vines, rendering all but the statue'southward silhouette virtually unrecognizable. Shortly later on he published the illustration, a grouping of bearding artists based in Charlottesville, Virginia, used it equally a model for their Kudzu Project. For the project, more than 30 knitters knitted hundreds of kudzu leaves, arranged them in loops and vines, and tossed them over the superlative of local Confederate monuments, taking photos of their work for posterity in each instance earlier the vines could be removed by authorities (fig. 8).17 Kudzu also factors into Aaron McIntosh's Invasive Queer Kudzu projection, in which he uses the weed as a metaphor for how queer people are viewed in American order (fig. 9). Hailing from Kingsport, Tennessee, and currently based in Richmond, Virginia, McIntosh holds workshops in which attendees make leaves telling aspects of their own stories, and he advertises for the workshops with images of the vine overtaking local monuments.18 In the spring of 2019, McIntosh reimagined the projection with a life-scale installation of the kudzu vine taking over a toppled Amalgamated monument at Richmond's 1708 Gallery.19
Fig. 8. The Kudzu Project at Albemarle County Courthouse, Charlottesville, VA, November, 2017. Photograph: Tom Cogill; image courtesy of The Kudzu Project
Fig. nine. Aaron McIntosh, Monument Invasion: Robert E. Lee Memorial, Richmond, VA, 2018, digital collage on archival inkjet print, thirty x twoscore inches, image courtesy of the artist
These artists may have hitting on a fitting metaphor for the Confederate monument, imagining an alternate future in which these monuments are reclaimed by the land on which they stand. Similar kudzu, the Confederate monument is an invasive species. Born out of a classical visual tradition and imported by travelers to foreign shores, the monument form took root in soil ideally suited for its cultivation. In the 150 years since the Civil State of war, approximately 1500 separate memorials to the Confederacy have appeared across the United States, spreading the Lost Cause myth and perpetuating the injustices begun under slavery and the rifts that take kept the nation from moving forward. In the manifesto on their website, the artists of the Kudzu Projection liken the romanticized architectural ruin covered in kudzu vines to the ideology of the Lost Cause, which cloaks slavery and racism in the pretty language of gentility and honor. For both invasive plants and invasive ideas, the way forward to a healthier mural is to fight to eradicate the invader and to uproot information technology from the soil that protects it. But as that fight continues, it is comforting to imagine one invasive species covering and overwhelming the other.
Cite this commodity: Sarah Beetham, "Confederate Monuments: Southern Heritage or Southern Art?" Panorama: Periodical of the Association of Historians of American Art half-dozen, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.9844.
PDF:Beetham, Amalgamated Monuments
Notes
Nigh the Author(s): Sarah Beetham is Assistant Professor and Chair of Liberal Arts at the Pennsylvania University of the Fine Arts
Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/little-of-artistic-merit/confederate-monuments/
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