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eBook
Contraband Guides
2020
Overview
In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents
Abroad , Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who
introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a \"contraband
guide,\" a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted
Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar
case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which
American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic
traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the
United States.
Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of
people of color in European art and society, and American artists
and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European
visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the
identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and
lesser-known artists and writers-such as the travel writings of
Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German
American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John
Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by
Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of
freed slave Eugène Warburg-Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes
expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply
inflected by European traditions.
By highlighting the contributions people of black African
descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this
period, along with the ways in which they were represented,
Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the
theme of race in Civil War-era American art. It will appeal to art
historians, to specialists in African American studies and American
studies, and to general readers interested in American art and
African American history.
Publisher
Penn State University Press
Subject
ISBN
9780271083858, 0271083859
