-By Warner Todd Huston
Washington Post Writer Philip Kennicott sees all the worst in America at the reopening of the famous Gettysburg Cyclorama.
Talk about a skewed look at history. On September 20, the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott unleashed a tirade against everything Civil War in a story that was supposed to be about the re-opening of the revamped Cyclorama painting in the America’s quintessential Civil War town, Gettysburg, PA. Not only did Kennicott denigrate in every way possible the over 100-year-old painting in the round of the battle of Gettysburg — it’s a mere “relic” that doesn’t live up to its hype he says — he also attacked Americans who have an interest in the Civil War as somehow just trying to forget about slavery. Kennicott also cast stones at capitalism and basically said that the gigantic painting was not really “art.” With his final analysis he seemed to turn up his nose at every aspect of the Civil War, Gettysburg, and the Cyclorama painting. If he hated the thing so much he should have stayed home and played a video game!
On the occasion of its re-opening Kennicott tells us that the famed 1884 painting received a $15 million restoration and has been returned as a major attraction at the recently completed Gettysburg visitors center. The way the public views the painting has also been changed to better reflect the way the creators had envisioned. A light and sound show has been added to enhance the viewing, as well. And, apparently this all does not sit very well with Kennicott.
As expected, his first paragraph sets the generally disparaging tone for this piece. Before he tells us that it was never a “great painting” in the first place, Kennicott scoffs that “For generations, kids have begged to see it, and for generations they have walked away wondering, is that all?”
He goes on:
The Gettysburg Cyclorama, a huge dinosaur of a painting left over from the heyday of circuses, magic shows and brass bands playing on the town square, has never been a great painting. Its cartoonish soldiers and clutter of horses never really delivered on the promise of an illusion so real you’d swear you were in the middle of the great Civil War battle.
Talk about a sour viewpoint. In the next paragraph Kennicott insists that the Cyclorama painting “never got better,” either. Obviously the writer finds little of value in the work and seems to want to belittle this effort as much as possible, deeming it an “antiquated illusion.”
The panorama is a fully rehabilitated entry in the catalogue of antiquated illusions, an entertainment like Grandma’s stereoscope, or the magic lantern shows that used to tour town to town back when telephones had cranks, not buttons. You can almost hear the barker shouting ridiculous superlatives — “The MOST MARVELOUS PRODUCTION of THIS AGE,” as an advertisement for the cyclorama more than a century ago put it (with a profusion of capital letters).
Next Kennicott dismissively claims that it is hard to convince people that this was once an attraction that caused Civil War veterans to weep upon seeing it.
It may take today’s visitor some convincing to believe the claim that “grown men wept” upon first seeing the cyclorama. And yet, contemporary accounts (collected in a newly published guide to the painting by Sue Boardman and Kathryn Porch) suggest that the illusion was compelling.
One wonders if Kennicott may soon be writing that it is hard to believe that grown men involved in WWII wept upon seeing the movie Saving Private Ryan, or would he smirk at Vietnam vets who shed a tear at the Vietnam Memorial in D.C.? To so discount the emotional response our veterans had to the Civil War merely because it is “antiquated” today seems rather heartless to me. Was the emotional upheaval that Civil War soldiers suffered in their dotage any less than that of the veterans of our day? Certainly not. But Kennicott doesn’t seem very open to such sympathies.
Then, after informing us that a man named Robert Barker invented the cyclorama concept in 1787, Kennicott seems to cast aspersions on the art form merely because “the military” became interested in the idea.
But the military, which saw a potential new avenue for studying and surveying landscape, was also interested in panorama, which seems to have influenced the form in two ways: a curious obsession with almost photorealist detail and a pervasive interest in depicting battle scenes.
What “but the military” means here is anybody’s guess. I mean, has there been any invention that hasn’t seen a military interest of use? Seems a sort of pointless observation in connection with this story.
Kennicott relates the history of who commissioned the Gettysburg painting and mentions that it was an “entrepreneurial venture” before he tells us that “In the early 19th century, serious artists admired the possibilities of panorama painting.” Then he ominously tells us that “soon autocrats” realized that they could create “propaganda” with the idea of a painting in the round. Why is this information relevant to the Gettysburg painting? Most likely because at the end of the piece Kennicott tries to make of this painting a venture of propaganda, free of any real artistic value, naturally.
Next Kennicott says that the Gettysburg Cyclorama was “hardly a great painting” and is “decidedly middle-brow” because, at the time the painting was created, art was being revolutionized by impressionist painters like Monet, Cézanne, and Degas. This elitist view denigrating the painting truly ignores the fact that its purpose was never to push the edges of artistic expression, but to capture an historic American moment for entrepreneurial purposes. It is wholly unfair to rap the Cyclorama because it doesn’t rise to the standards of the newest ideas in what constituted “art” in its day.
Kennicott next gives a backhanded compliment to the success of the work saying that it is “sophisticated” because its choice of subject matter, Pickett’s Charge, “ensured maximum sympathy — and thus maximum profitability — from its audiences. Northerners could see themselves victorious, while Southerners had the consolation of admiring themselves in heroic defeat at a moment when the course of the war could have gone in a very different direction.”
I guess it couldn’t be because even before the war was over people had begun to feel that Pickett’s Charge marked the high point of the success of the nascent Confederacy and that this moment in history represented a focal point for Americans on both sides of the Mason, Dixon line, eh? Further, what would have been another choice here? Should the town of Gettysburg have housed a painting on the battle of Shiloh? Seriously, what other battle does Kennicott think the town of Gettysburg should have hosted?
But, it isn’t until the end of this piece that we begin to discern why Philip Kennicott seems to have such disdain for this whole subject matter. He seems to think that the whole project, then and now, is all but an excuse for White Americans to try and “deflect attention” from our “unequally shared wound of slavery.”
At least one early souvenir program for the panorama shows a Union and Confederate soldier shaking hands, an image of reconciliation that gained momentum in the decades after the panorama was unveiled. By representing a moment when the balance of power might have changed, the painting, and the larger obsession with Gettysburg as a battlefield, seems to equate the North and South, and neutralize their moral and political differences in a shared sense of passionate commitment and individual heroism. It argues that we all share the wound of Civil War — which is a convenient way of deflecting attention from the more particular and unequally shared wound of slavery.
In fact, Kennicott posits that the very existence of this work is nothing but a way to make the South look good to the nation.
But the message of the Gettysburg Cyclorama (brought to the United States by a Northern businessman) is all about the nation perpetually trapped at the moment of the South’s greatest glory.
So, the post Civil War era immediately afterwards and all the way to today, is nothing but an attempt to revel in the “South’s greatest glory”? Kennicott seems to imagine that our nation still has yet to deal with slavery, as if 600,000 American deaths did nothing to assuage that guilt, as if the assassination of a president was meaningless in payment of that debt, as if the last 40 years of penance over race has not occurred, and as if every grade school in the nation ignored the issue instead of teaching it at the complete expense of the rest of our history as they now nearly universally do!
It all amounts to looking for depth in a thimbleful of water. In an age when every last “artist” claims to be mining the farthest reaches of philosophical meaning with their work, Kennicott misses that the Cyclorama was never meant to have a deep, controversial raison d’etre. The Cyclorama was never meant as a cynical message on war, history or the meaning of the Civil War. It was created as a cool way to pass the day and commemorate a great battle in our war between the states. It wasn’t meant to be great art. It wasn’t meant to celebrate the “lost cause” mythos. It wasn’t meant to “deflect attention from slavery.” It was just meant to remember the war fought to end it.
It was meant for those kids that Kennicott began his piece mentioning. So that they could marvel at the horrors and grandeur of one of the greatest moments in our history. So that they wouldn’t forget what their fathers had gone through. So that we might not fall to George Santayana’s warning of those forgetting history being condemned to repeat it. Yes, it even was meant to fulfill the pedestrian purpose of making a little money.
Sadly, Kennicott seems to want to use the Gettysburg Cylcorama as just another excuse to bash the USA. At its grand reopening, Kennicott sees nothing but the worst in it and the country. One wonders if the folks at the Gettysburg visitors center thought that this dismissive piece was damning the whole thing with faint praise. They’d be right to wish Kennicott hadn’t bothered.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston