Episode No. 54 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Eleanor Harvey and Jennifer Watts.
First, in “The Civil War and American Art,” which opens tomorrow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, curator Eleanor Jones Harvey reveals how artists such as Winslow Homer, Sanford Gifford and Frederic Church, responded to the war in their work. Her show examines how artists bent traditional American landscape painting into a response to the war, how artists experienced the war first-hand and how one artist’s time in uniform led to what seems to be the only known paintings of a militarily occupied American city. The show’s catalogue, published by Yale University Press, is a smart, strikingly exciting page-turner, the best book about American art I’ve read all year.
On the second segment, Huntington curator Jennifer Watts talks about her new show, “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War,” an exhibition of more than 200 pictures and other objects from the Huntington’s famed Civil War-related collections. The exhibition is chock full of still-shocking battlefield pictures, rare pictures of Southern troops and of black troops and remarkable photographs of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train. Many of them are available on the Huntington’s exhibition website.
Air date: Nov. 15, 2013.

Martin Johnson Heade, Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Sanford R. Gifford, Fort Federal Hill at Sunset, Baltimore, 1862. Collection of the New York State Military Museum, New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs.

Conrad Wise Chapman, The Flag of Sumter, Oct 20 1863, 1863–64. Collection of The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.

Conrad Wise Chapman, Fort Sumter Interior, Sunrise, Dec. 9, 1863, 1863–64. Collection of the The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.

Albert Bierstadt. Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War, 1862. Collection of The Century Association, New York.

Winslow Homer, Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864. Collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Sanford R. Gifford, Twilight in the Catskills, 1861. Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

Unidentified photographer, U.S. Colored Troops, Camp William Penn, Philadelphia, c. 1863. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.

Jay Dearborn Edwards, Scrapbook 2, page 2 – Photographs by J.D. Edwards depicting Confederate soldiers drilling and at rest near Pensacola, Florida, and environs (detail), c. 1861. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.

Andrew J. Russell, Soldiers’ Burying Ground, Alexandria, Va., May 1863, 1863. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.

Ridgway Glover, Dispersing the Crowd at Sixth and Chestnut, Philadelphia, 1865. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.