U.S. Battle Art

Americans, though not a warlike people, have produced some of the world's most formidable armies. They have also commemorated them, from the Revolution to World War II, in some remarkable martial paintings.

For the first time, an inclusive exhibition of those paintings was shown last week in Washington's National Gallery of Art. "American Battle Paintings 1776-1918" (116 pictures) was organized by Critic Lincoln Kirstein and the National Gallery's Mrs. Margaret Garrett, jointly sponsored by the National Gallery and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, where it will be shown next fall.

The exhibition was arranged chronologically, classified by wars. The Revolution--"sparsely documented"--produced few paintings. Notable was Emanuel Leutze's study for his famed Washington Crossing the Delaware, probably the best known U.S. historical painting. Leutze painted his monumental Crossing in Duesseldorf, Germany, 74 years after the event, used as models two young U.S. art students.

The only departures from the conventional among early U.S. battle paintings were those made by American Indians, depicting frontier skirmishes. One, painted by Sitting Bull, was a crude impression of a fierce struggle in which a white man in top hat and tail coat was spitted by an arrow, shed buckets of blood.

The Civil War, largest section of the show, included less heroic action, simpler scenes of soldier life. There were Civil War paintings by William Morris Hunt, Eastman Johnson, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Nast, Winslow Homer. Eastman Johnson's A Ride for Liberty showed Negro slaves galloping to sanctuary in the Union lines. Of A Ride, Painter Johnson wrote: "A veritable incident . . . seen by myself at Centreville, on the morning of McClellan's advance." Most of the Civil War pictures bore out a remark once made by Ulysses S. Grant to a contemporary war artist: "We are the men who make history . . . but you are the men who perpetuate it."

"I Suffered, I Was There." Among the show's World War I artists were Wallace Morgan, Ernest Peixotto, Horace Pippin, George Harding, Henry Schnakenberg, George Picken, Kerr Eby.

Outstanding was September 13, 1918, Saint Mihiel, by 54-year-old Kerr Eby, now painting for the Marines. It was a pencil drawing of weary, bent men on the march under a sky filled with a ponderous black cloud. Artist Eby says that the cloud hung in the sky for three days; the Germans thought it was an omen.

The spirit of the show is well summed up in Kirstein's catalogue introduction: "The best American battle paintings have been modest. They are filled with the quiet, well observed reporting of the conscientious correspondent, whose notebooks reflect the words of Walt Whitman's great inscription--I was the man, I suffered, I was there."

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