World Famous Comics: Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art
Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art
From: University of South Carolina Press Publisher: University of South Carolina Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: University of South Carolina Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 166 Publication Date: January 31, 2008
Product Description: An exhibition catalog for a traveling exhibit to be debuted in January 2008, "Landscape of Slavery" marries art history with social history in an original study of plantation images from the eighteenth century through the present in an effort to unravel the realities and fictions inherent in this subject matter. Through eighty-nine color plates and six thematic essays, the collection examines depictions of plantations, plantation views, and related slave imagery in the context of the history of landscape painting in America, while addressing the impact of these images on U.S. race relations.A genre predominantly tied to the American South, the plantation view has traditionally received marginal attention in the study of American landscape art. Viewed primarily as a derivative of the early-eighteenth-century British estate view, the plantation image straddles the aesthetic boundary between topographical depiction and landscape painting. In recent years, plantation views have attracted the attention of several social historians who have identified the genre as a rich source for exploring issues of wealth, power, race, memory, nostalgia, and resentment. With each field of study operating independently, the various conclusions drawn suggest only a partial understanding of the issues that surround plantation images and related images of slavery in art. This exhibition and corresponding catalog, therefore, will provide an opportunity for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of plantation imagery in the American South.
Recommended for anyone interested in Southern history and culture As is my habit with art books, I leafed through to view the images before reading the text. The bucolic scenes transported me back to a genteel time, when American was young and rich and full of promise.
Which is precisely the dilemma of plantation art. Typically hung in the landscape section of galleries, it reinforces the seductive myth of the Antebellum South as paradise lost. But in reality plantations were slave labor camps, and mostly absent from the paintings are the slaves upon whose labor the plantation rested and who, when depicted at all, are merely quaint accents or contented pets of benevolent masters.
LANDSCAPE OF SLAVERY serves as a companion to a traveling exhibit of the same name organized by the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Carolina Art Association. It explores the complex and incompatible experiences of plantation life represented in works by diverse artists, from picturesque painters such as Thomas Coram through Winslow Homer (who, as Michael D. Harris writes, appears to have been "more sensitive to different notions evoked by the word `plantation'") to Hale Woodruff whose work is full of rage.
All of the essays provide thought-provoking commentary on this complex dynamic. "Picturing the Plantation" provides an overview of the landscape tradition and its idealizing vocabulary, while "Identifying Spaces of Blackness" explores the African aesthetic found in rituals, ceremonies, dance, music and art created by slaves as a means of resistance and survival. "The Most Famous Plantation of All" about the politics and painting of Mount Vernon sent me to the internet where the web site of the Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens offers this rationale for why the Father of Our Country owned human beings:
"George Washington was born into a world in which slavery was accepted."
Of course, the "acceptance" of slavery depended upon one's vantage point. Ditto "nostalgia." I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in American art in general, and Southern history and culture in particular. It will definitely enrich your next visit to the landscape gallery.
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