Getting Nasty:
Politics, Patriotism, and
Works on Paper
John Sartain (1808-1897)
after George Caleb Bingham
Stump Speaking (The County Election) , 1854
engraving on paper
museum purchase
© Addison Gallery of American Art
Politics has often provided raw material for American artists, and the Addison's permanent collection of works on paper is rich in such images. With a heated presidential campaign underway, these objects are especially topical and show parallels between our time and the past.
The artists and subjects of this small show are wide ranging. George Caleb Bingham, for instance, was an early chronicler of campaigning American style. Stump Speaking shows a give and take between candidate and crowd in an atmosphere of fundamental sanity and balance. Bingham helped define democracy in the popular imagination as a system best equipped to air and to decide issues of civic importance.
Thomas H. Nast (1840-1902)
Republican Principles - Democratic Principles
from Harper's Weekly, 1871
wood engraving on newsprint
museum purchase
© Addison Gallery of American Art
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The tumult of the Civil War and its aftermath, including the murder of Lincoln, introduced an era of vicious politics defined by the work of Thomas Nast. The most famous caricaturist of his era, Nast aimed at his targets with an outspoken fury. A ferocious Republican, he challenged the patriotism of Democrats, whose party he viewed as disloyal during the war. He pilloried the regime of New York's corrupt Boss Tweed. Nast was also profoundly anti-Catholic, anti-alcohol, and anti-immigration.
A trio of cartoons by Nast considers the disputed 1876 presidential election, a contest with many parallels to the 2000 election. Nast seems more balanced but, still, gravely insulting in one of the engravings, where he suggest that recently freed and uneducated African-Americans in the South and recent immigrants in the North were manipulated by both Republican and Democratic bosses in equal measure to keep or gain power.
Thomas H. Nast (1840-1902)
The Power Behind the Throne
from Harper's Weekly, 1870
wood engraving on newsprint
museum purchase
© Addison Gallery of American Art
The late 1960s was another period of great division. Donald Blumberg's montage of the 1968 funeral of murdered civil rights leader Martin Luther King evokes a time of almost surreal tragedy. His montage from a television address by President Nixon in 1969 suggests the multiple agendas and frequent repositionings for which Nixon became famous. Much as Nast's cartoons helped define the public's view of politics and its personalities, by the 1960s television was crafting the period's civic icons.
Influenced by war, assasination, and riots, art during this era treating politics often had a deeper bite than works exploring the same subjects in the less contentious 1950s. Compared to Blumberg's work, Robert Frank's photographs of a Chicago political rally in 1956 have a quiet irony matching the temper of the time.
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