TO SHAPE A PAST

In American art, social memory can surface in odd, oblique ways. There is no big commemorative painting–or none of any merit–that shows a battle from the worst trauma in the country’s history, the Civil War. In fact, the best Civil War painting doesn’t show a war and has only one figure in it. It is The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, by Winslow Homer (1836-1910). In an earlier America, there wasn’t even much past to remember; there are no Puritan monuments, for instance, except for individual gravestones. Memory had to be imported. This was very much the point of the style that became the official architectural language of the Revolution: neoclassicism, based on ancient Roman models.

The man who brought it in was Thomas Jefferson, in his role as architect. Educated in Williamsburg, Virginia, he despised its provincial-English buildings as “rude, mis-shapen piles.” Jefferson found his model for a new American architecture in the south of France: a Roman temple, the so-called Maison Carree, or Square House, which he felt exemplified the candid virtues of the old Roman state. It became the basis of his design for the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, completed in 1799. It was the first temple-form state building to be erected anywhere in 1,500 years–new because it was old, commemorating the past in the interest of the future, a model for architecture in the new democracy. And he followed it with the greatest of his designs, the rotunda and pavilions of the University of Virginia, his “academical village” (1817-26).

The American Revolution gave artists a new subject: now that America had a history with its own large repercussions on the world, and a cast of heroes and Founding Fathers to match, it needed icons of both. The test case was George Washington, who died in 1799. Paintings of him were in fairly abundant supply. The record for Washingtons, however, was set by the gifted and profligate Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) after the President first sat for him in Philadelphia in 1795. Stuart painted at least 114 of them, 111 of them replicas of three originals that he made from life.

By the end of the 1820s the interest in commemorating political heroes had largely dried up, and there was no enthusiasm for history painting. Landscape held center stage. Then as now, Americans were incurious about their own history; they were fixated on the future. The sense of commemoration would hardly revive until after the murder of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Lincoln’s death seems to mark the point at which Americans began to feel a public emotion that, in their pride at their newness and possibility, they had not felt before. It was nostalgia, a sense of irretrievable loss. Some writers and painters, at least, began to sense a fault line in American history–the way in which America’s eager anticipation of the future might turn into a more doubt-ridden view of progress, after the fratricidal horrors of the Civil War. To Henry Adams, writing in the early 1900s, the assassination seemed to have thrown Americans into a state of mind without connection to the past; it was a secular analogy to the death of God.

Perhaps the most interesting painter to reflect this mood was John Frederick Peto (1854-1907), who specialized in eye-fooling, hypernaturalistic still life. In his work, the image of the martyred Lincoln recurs frequently, to the point of obsession, usually taking the form of a daguerreotype pinned to the board or pushed under a tape. Peto was praised for what Americans traditionally liked, skill and illusionistic power (How the hell did he do that?). But his deeper anxiety and the hints of an imperiled social order, reflected in the entropy of his objects, were lost on viewers.

The great 19th century commemorator in sculpture was the Irish-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). His deepest memorial was dedicated to the Union Army’s Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who led the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, made up entirely of black volunteers, in a death charge on the ramparts of Fort Wagner in South Carolina. It is an extraordinary work, not only because of its sculptural mastery and its integration of Renaissance motifs into a modern matrix, but also for its content: one of the very few 19th century American treatments of blacks in art that neither mocks nor condescends but treats them as fellow human beings in their own full vitality and presence.

Later American art contains elegies of a more personal kind, right down to the various works of art that reflect the grief of the AIDS epidemic. Among the most moving utterances of personal loss, though the most heavily coded, is Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), evoking his homosexual lover, who was killed at the start of World War I. By contrast, Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, illustrates America’s yearning for the sainthood of remote, unknowable celebrity.

But what of formal commemoration–of heroes, wars, political events? Many would concur that the one completely successful U.S. memorial in the past quarter-century is in Washington and commemorates the American dead of the Vietnam War. It was designed by a then unknown 21-year-old architecture student named Maya Lin, and when it was chosen in 1981, it was met by a barrage of criticism from those on the right who felt that because it didn’t have bronze figures in it, it somehow dishonored the dead. It consisted of nothing but the names of the 58,000 dead, engraved on continuous black granite walls. But it has proved to be the most respected, the most socially used war memorial in America, where people come to leave flowers, kiss the names of the dead, make rubbings of the names: an almost purely conceptual sculpture, transcending the bitterness over the most divisive conflict in U.S. history since the Civil War, a century earlier.