‘Annihilation’ Surveys Civil War’s Tragedy

No matter how hard we try to keep life and art separate, they keep reminding us that their borders overlap. Current witness to this is an exceptionally pungent small exhibition at the Huntington’s Scott Gallery called “Images of Annihilation: Ruins in Civil War America.”

On its face the show deals with some 40 photographs, drawings, engravings, books and periodicals recording images of the wreckage wreaked in the war between the states, a ghastly conflict by any measure. The brainchild of Huntington research associate Leo Mazow, the ensemble addresses at a deeper level the way art and life interpenetrate and, in the process, alter each other’s meanings.

In the 18th century at the dawn of Romanticism, English gentleman amateurs like Horace Walpole became interested in architecture--including ruins--as a free-standing, mood-inducing aesthetic phenomenon. They actually built fragments of Greek temples or medieval castles on their estates. These so-called “follies” had a playful rococo edge, like stage sets intended to jog fake emotions in those too jaded to have many real ones.

American aesthetes inherited the practice but changed its meanings. Here, as Mazow points out in an informative brochure, ruins came to symbolize a young nation’s aspirations to stability and grandeur.

In the 1860s, the reality of our Cain and Abel conflict exploded that dream. Ruins ceased to be art. They became evidence of actual devastation and despair. Andrew J. Russell’s photograph “Commodore Dead” shows a locomotive tipped over and crushed like the broken toy of a wanton child. But it’s quite factual, as is a bird’s-eye view of the wrecked Confederate capitol, Richmond, Va., by an artist known only as Hathaway.

*

There’s a quality of muddle about the exhibition that should not, I think, be ascribed to curatorial shortcoming. The sense of messiness rather comes from ambiguities created by artists trying to make an awkward transition. Accustomed to depicting ruins as objects of rather grand aesthetic delectation--as art--these artists were suddenly faced with depicting the same kind of images with the intention of stirring negative emotions--as propaganda.

Photographs by George N. Barnard, for example, are among the finest on view. His “Ruins of the Railroad Depot in Charleston, S.C.” has a wonderful, magisterial calm that makes a series of stark masonry arches look more like an ancient Roman aqueduct than the horrifying result of present pillage.

Most images here were made by Union artists. Their larger intention was to make the Confederacy look like the bad guys. (The South was taking too much of a beating to retaliate.) At the same time, most of the destruction shown was done by the North. (Back then it may not have been as easy as it is today to convince the public that the damage you did was the other guy’s fault.)

Several images reflect a nagging awareness that they are subject to multiple interpretations rather than to the single meanings required by propaganda. Most disturbed and unsettling is an engraving after F.A.O. Darley’s image of Sherman’s 1864 scorch-and-burn march through the South. The general surveys a distant skirmish while a building flames behind him. His soldiers dismantle railway tracks with rather too much destructive zeal. In the lower corner a refugee family of African Americans is on the run. Presumably they’re intended to symbolize slaves set free by the noble North. Chillingly, however, the rather Gotterdammerung demeanor of the scene suggests they are just as likely to be the Union soldier’s next victims.

Other hints of uneasiness with the changed symbolic meanings of ruins turn up. The front page of a New York magazine features “The Sack of Blair Mansion,” a building razed by Southern troops. The engraved picture of the Neoclassical structure is played very small and a cartoon-like scene of carousing Confederate soldiers very large.

Artists made juxtapositions such as those in a scrapbook of watercolors kept by Robert Knox Sneden. One page shows a 17th century church ruined by rebel forces. It is compared with the same building before war, covered with ivy, in dignified decay. Such comparisons clearly try to draw the difference between ruins created by the erosion of time and those imposed by battle.

In the end it’s to the credit of these Civil War artists that they just weren’t very good at propaganda. Despite themselves, they left a record that says that this conflict, like all of them, was grand in nothing but the scope of its tragedy.

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, through June 30, closed Mondays, (818) 405-2141.