Black Representation in Postbellum Era Art Followi Essays

Black Representation in Postbellum Era Art Following the abolition of slavery in 1865, it took a substantial amount of time for the representation of African-American people in American art to establish itself beyond the grotesque and the caricatured. Before slavery and the plantations were outlawed due to the civil war, American representation of blacks were shown as cartoon caricatures; as generic, racial stereotypes with no individuality of their own. This is demonstrated by a number of artworks prevalent at the time. Blackness was either relegated to the sidelines of the paintings, sculpture and engravings, or else excluded completely from the image. And although the outlawing of slavery was done in order to generate equality and liberty across the United States, racism was still prevalent, and it would also take some time before the actual identity of blackness in the United States managed to transcend that of an oppressed, racial stereotype, and began to take on and repr esent a history and a culture of its own, instead of merely providing the negative for the representation of whiteness. A great many critics argue that this breakthrough was made ironically by a sculpture made and funded by white people, in the Shaw's Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Despite Saint-Gauden's obvious inclinations towards racial stereotyping in words (his memoirs justify this statement), thanks to a number of coincidences, his artistic credibility, and the amount of time he was given to produce this sculpture, he managed to represent blackness not as caricatured, but as a disparate but unified whole. But some critics of the Shaw Memorial still uphold the belief that it is inherently racist. In the following essay, I will look briefly at the history of black representation in the art of post-bellum America, than engage in a closer analysis of the Shaw Memorial, in order to see exactly what is being represented and how. Monumental sculpture in partic ular had a great history in providing people with allusions to the real, held as less of an illusion than the representations made in other arts, such as painting. The representation of Apollo in the famous sculpture had provided people with a benchmark for human aesthetic beauty for thousands of years, and sculpture seemed conducive to the production and the replication of this ideal human form. This has serious implications for the evolution of how Black American slaves in postbellum America were represented. Kirk Savage suggests that: "Sculpture's relation to the human body had always been more direct and intimate than painting's: the sculptor's main task was not to create illusions on a flat surface but to reproduce three-dimensional bodies in real space." HYPERLINK https://www.ukessays.com/essays/arts/black-representation-postbellum-era-4787.php \l _ftn1 [1] Additionally, because of the importance by which public sculpture was held at the time, as a monument dedic ated to, rather than imposed upon the community, the development of a realistic representation of the African American body in the art of the time is not to be underestimated. Savage goes on to say: "The sculpture of antiquity thus became an authenticating document of a normative white body, a 'race' of white men." HYPERLINK https://www.ukessays.com/essays/arts/black-representation-postbellum-era-4787.php \l _ftn2 [2] The fair representation of blackness in sculpture was therefore central to the cause of representing blackness as equal in America. However, it would still be some time before the representation of the hero would be anything but white. This white hero occurred on both sides of the slavery divide, as those from the South would paint a picture of the generous, selfless plantation owner, whereas those from the North would paint an equally white picture of figures fighting for the liberty of black slaves. From the Journal of Popular Culture: "In the postb ellum reminiscences, a slaveholder's chivalric spirit was manifested through feats of selfless generosity." HYPERLINK https://www.ukessays.com/essays/arts/black-representation-postbellum-era-4787.php \l _ftn3 [3] Also, representations of the South didn't differ: "refusing to concede an exclusive grant of heroic title to the friends and relatives of slaveholders, those who had gloried in the 1865 Union victory demanded an equal chance to create their own champions of popular culture. In the manner of their southern counterparts, they sought to 'rescue from oblivion' the 'true' history of an 'unpretending, liberty-loving and Christian people.'" HYPERLINK https://www.ukessays.com/essays/arts/black-representation-postbellum-era-4787.php \l _ftn4 [4] So, despite