Dixon exhibit explores American identity through Civil War art, prose : GoMemphis.com

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags ...

-- Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman seemed born to be the poet of mid-19th century America. In striving to define the meaning of democracy in a young, vital and contradictory nation, he mirrored the struggle of the country itself as it fell into a fratricidal civil war that not only devastated the population but gave painful birth to new ideas and attitudes that Americans would share about their country and themselves.

Opening Sunday at Dixon Gallery and Gardens, the exhibition "Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era" explores the theme of American identity by juxtaposing a variety of art from the period -- portraits, landscapes and genre pictures, scenes of the battlefield -- with lines from some of Whitman's most thoughtful or popular poems, particularly those that deal with the death of Abraham Lincoln. The exhibition will be displayed at the Dixon through Oct. 2, after which it will travel to the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y.

"Bold, Cautious, True" -- the title comes from a phrase in a poem by Whitman that commemorates the grave of an unknown soldier -- was curated by Dixon director Kevin Sharp.

"I've been doing 19th century American art history my whole career," said Sharp, "and I was always aware of this odd rupture at the center that no one knows what to do with, and that's the Civil War. That horrendous event marks the end of the romantic Hudson River School and the beginning of American realism and modernism. Finally I thought that I was ready to contend with this thing myself. And the opportunity was there. I got to the Dixon in August 2007, and here was the exhibition schedule for 2009, coming up in the blink of an eye."

Sharp said that he had never organized an exhibition so quickly. "Ideally," he said, "it should have taken another year."

The exhibition includes 54 objects gathered from museums around the country. The list of lenders includes such prestigious institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (where former Dixon director John Buchanan is the director); The Boston Athenaeum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; The Detroit Institute of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; The New-York Historical Society; and 35 other museums and individuals.

"Certainly getting all of this work together required some tough negotiations," said Sharp, "but we got commitments from John Buchanan in San Francisco and from The Metropolitan first, and that helped with the other loans. Once you have key lenders early on, well, that's the right move."

The centrality of Whitman, whose poetry collection "Leaves of Grass," published in 1855, gave America a voice befitting its multitudinous democracy, depends on more than just quotations from his poems in the exhibition. In December 1862, the poet learned that his brother George had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, and he embarked on a journey from Brooklyn south to find his brother. Find him he eventually did, and not seriously injured, but Whitman was so gravely impressed by the legions of sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals and camps around Washington, that he devoted the next two years to tending to the ravaged young men, comforting them, writing letters for them, sitting by their death-beds. That sense of compassion and devotion deeply informs the spirit of "Bold, Cautious, True."

The exhibition and its accompanying catalog, written by Sharp (with the assistance of researcher Adam M. Thomas in two chapters), address the issues and conflicts created by the war and public reaction to it in several sections, including "The Poetics of a House Divided," "The Poetics of Service," "The Wound-Dresser" and "The Poetics of Endings and Beginnings."

"We're dealing with defining moments," Sharp said. "Americans had to invent ways to understand what they had been through. Here the country wasn't even 90 years old, and it was divided along national, state and family lines."

Aside from the intensely realistic views of Winslow Homer, who, in a sense, reported from the battlefield and the home front in engraved prints carried by Northern magazines and newspapers -- 11 of his works are included in the show -- many of the pieces in "Bold, Cautious, True" will strike viewers as sentimental, or at least nostalgic.

The young man dressed in a recruit's uniform carving his sweetheart's initials into a tree while she looks on ("In the Beech Wood," George Cochran Lambdin); the Southern family apprehensively assembled for the opening of an envelope with a black seal, denoting the death of husband and father ("The Letter," William D. Washington); the Confederate soldier leaning dejectedly on his rifle in front of his damaged cottage ("The Lost Cause," Henry Mosler, interestingly enough, a Northerner): These and other paintings seem designed to elicit more of an emotional than esthetic response, though art patrons in the mid-19th century knew how to "read" narrative art and to make the connection between subject and craft.

As Sharp said, "The Civil War quickly became the Omega to the Alpha of the Revolutionary War. The nation does come to an end. People and artists, too, couldn't help casting retrospective looks at the past."

An exhibition that takes its themes from the most devastating war in American history, a war that ended with the assassination of a popular leader and figurehead, cannot help conveying a sense of tragedy, solemnity and even nobility. Works of art that depict the heroism of common soldiers and their officers, of escaped slaves, of the women and children left behind, even in their sentimentality evoke a feeling of awe.

The exhibition concludes with a series of radiant yet somber landscape paintings, as if in the memories of the artists -- and the country -- the Civil War's effect lingered ambiguously.

"Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era"

Sunday through Oct. 2 at Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 4339 Park Ave. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m., Sunday. Admission: $7 for adults, $5 for 65 and older; $5 for students 18 and older; $3 for children 7 to 17; 6 and under free. Tuesdays are "Pay-What-You-Can," and admission is free Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon. For more information, call 761-5250 or visit www.dixon.org.