The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum Studies
Volume 27, no. 1 (Spring 2001)
Edited by Gregory Nosan
In this handsome publication, six distinguished authors examine important works from The Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection–among them John Quincy Adams Ward’s sculpture The Freedman, Albert Bierstadt’s painting Mountain Brook, and photographer Timothy O’Sullivan’s A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania–and participate in a common conversation about how art, freedom, race, and national identity intersected during the Civil War period. Historians have long considered the Civil War (1861-65) to be a second American Revolution, an event that realized the Declaration of Independence’s social contract and fundamentally changed the political, social, and cultural structure of the nation. Terrain of Freedom charts how the crisis of the Civil War inspired radical shifts in the aesthetic and political goals of American painters and sculptors. Showcasing new scholarship on a remarkable range of nineteenth-century art—from landscape painting to scientific photography, popular broadsides to public monuments—this beautifully illustrated issue offers readers an expanded sense of the Civil War’s effects on both artistic representation and the shape of the national imagination. The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, published twice annually, presents articles on the collections and history of the Art Institute.
Articles in this publication:
Eric Foner, “The Civil War and the Story of American Freedom”
Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War”
Angela Miller, “Albert Bierstadt, Landscape Aesthetics, and the Meanings of the West in the Civil War Era”
Steven Conn & Andrew Walker, “The History in the Art: Painting the Civil War”
Margaret Rose Vendryes, “Race Identity/Identifying Race: Robert S. Duncanson and Nineteenth-Century American Painting”
104 pages, 8 3/8 x 10 1/4 in.
ISBN-13: 9780865591868
ISBN-10: 0865591865
