R.W. Norton Art Gallery

In 1864 a woman in southwest Georgia climbed a guard tower at the Civil War prisoner of war camp near Andersonville, and peered down into the stockade. Camp Sumter teamed with thousands of Union prisoners–skeletal men shuffling about in tattered rags in open, fetid air or lying, some near death, in hovels called “she-bangs”.
She wrote: “My heart aches for these poor wretches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia and go to Andersonville and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!”
He had none for the commander of the camp, Captain Heinrich Hartmann Wirz. After a trial in Washington, D.C. in 1865, he was hanged as a war criminal.
Those living cadavers the woman saw that day were sick and starving, yet, among many, something stirred in their souls. They turned to art, as a way to find a light of hope and purpose in a hopeless, dark existence. Many of their works are on view at the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site near Americus, Georgia, which preserves the Civil War stockade and a national cemetery of 18,000 interments, including the prison dead, and deceased veterans of other American conflicts.
Start your visit at the museum in the visitor center, where you wend your way through time. Exhibits depict men and women in enemy captivity from America’s earliest days to those captured in the Iraq War in March 2003. Above exhibits, regardless of the eras they depict, hang murals of grainy old photographs of Andersonville and other Civil War prison camps, North and South, where death rates soared from illness, exposure, and mistreatment. Confederates shivered through hard winters in the northernmost camp at Elmira, New York. Northerners suffered through blazing summers at the westernmost stockade, Camp Ford in Tyler, Texas. It housed many Union soldiers captured during the 1864 Red River Campaign in Louisiana.
Prisoners live a meager and often dangerous existence. Those held by Japanese in World War II and by North Korea and North Vietnam in later conflicts suffered most in these militaristic cultures that equated surrender with depravity. They considered any one who surrendered instead of sacrificing themselves were the lowest of creatures, so they treated captives as animals.
Step into a darkened recreation of a prison camp and suddenly lights flare and sirens blare and rifle shots ring out from high walls strung in barbed wire. In another, a prisoner in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” sits manacled in a concrete cell the size of a closet. Food, what little was offered, was shoved through a slit in the heavy cell door.

These works of art filled long hours of prisoners' time.

The woman peering into the Georgia stockade likely did not see something else that was happening. Down there, Private John Braley of the 3rd Maine Cavalry was carving a ring from a bone with whatever sharp object he could scrounge. Nearby, another POW was fashioning from bone a kerchief slide, adorned with the Union shield. Still another spent days, even months, creating a puzzle box. All are displayed here, although time and the earth itself surely claimed other works in whatever media the men might excel: sharp blade shaping wood or bone, stubs of pencil forming words or images on scraps of paper. When the heart suffers most, art often finds a way from dark misery into light.
Prisoners often combined art with utility. In World War II, George Mayberry made sandals of straw, while George F. Harmon fashioned a pouch from a blanket scrap. James Creamer made a cigarette case by weaving strips of cans of Klim powdered milk. Otto Schwarz created a bamboo lighter while working as a Japanese POW on the infamous Burma-Thailand highway. Karl Kossin smoked pipes he carved by hand while a prisoner of the North Koreans.
No doubt some prisoners had rarely if ever indulged artistic impulses until imprisonment gave them only time. Some turned to writing if paper, pen or pencil were available. The museum preserves the wartime log of Phileas Boase, whose thoughts turned to a woman of his civilian days. His simple poetry sings of his love for “Tommy girl”.

Row after row of marble mark the graves of those who died at Andersonville.

Curtis G. Davis, a slave laborer in a Tokyo steel mill, secured watercolors and paper painted watercolors from the Japanese black market. In one work, dated December of 1943, he painted a poignant image of memory, home and hope: Santa Claus with toy-laden bag and reindeer. Art stirred his patriotism, too. Curtis G. Davis, in a prison camp in Tokyo, painted an American flag. In violation of camp authority, Davis and fellow POWs stood at attention before the piece of paper and recited the Pledge of Allegiance on New Year’s Day of 1945, the year of their ultimate delivery from the hands of their captors.
“I was a very, very proud American army private that day,” Davis recalls. “I can assure you some time later the Japanese found the flag, confiscated it, and threw it in the office trash. One of the prisoners emptying the trash found it and returned it to me.”
After the war, former POWs gave shape and form to their prison experience through their art. Lieutenant Commander John McGrath produced a series of sketches revealing his treatment in a North Vietnam prison. They portray horrendous rope torture sessions, prisoners forced to wear manacles and leg irons for days at a time, and the humiliating practice of having to bow to every captor with the words “Bao Cao”, meaning to report.

Georgia's poignant monument rises above an entrance to the Andersonville National Cemetery

To create art in a pit of degradation no doubt inspires the heart and steels the will to live, while passing long periods of time. Art, however, could not stop death. Braley, who made his ring of bone, died on August 5, 1864. He is buried in the Andersonville National Cemetery, where most of the prison dead are identified, thanks to Clara Barton. The Civil War nurse came to Andersonville in July 1865 to identify and mark the graves.
In its own way, the cemetery itself, with its rows of white marble markers in a large, green clearing in the trees is indeed a thing of beauty in a place of pain. State monuments rise in honor of their sons and daughters. (Yes, there were women incarcerated at Andersonville, too). Few are as poignant as Georgia’s monument, portraying three figures in rags, one on a crutch, supporting each other above a scripture taken from Zechariah 9:12: “Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of Hope.”
Andersonville National Historic site is 12 miles north of Americus on Georgia 49. The museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. For more information, see National Park Service.

By Gary D. Ford
February 9, 2012

If you can pull yourself away from Graceland, spend one more day in Memphis and see two museums for half the price. Through October 9, admission to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art also opens the door at Dixon Gallery and Gardens. Both museums showcase special exhibits of American and French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both can be seen in a few hours. Both offer restaurants for lunch, if you can also tear yourself away from the lure of Memphis ribs.

Since 1916 “the Brooks”, as Memphians call this jewel in Overton Park, has lured visitors to its collections ranging from antiquities to Renaissance works to modern artists. A nice surprise is the collection by Carl Gutherz (1844-1907), a Swiss-born artist who trained at the École des Beaux Art in Paris and spent his adolescent and early adult years here, where he married a Memphis belle.
The special exhibition, Monet to Cézanne/Cassatt to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution, fills five galleries. I strolled through it on a weekday morning when it was busy but not crowded, and visitors took their time stepping into the Impressionist world of Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, William Singer Sargent, and others. Two of those “others” fascinated me. I saw the founder of the museum as a young woman portrayed in a red-trimmed black riding habit and top hat in Portrait of Bessie Vance, circa 1890, by Katharine Augusta Carl (1854-1938). The Norton displays a work by this New Orleans-born artist who spent her childhood in Memphis.
Summer Afternoon, circa 1915, bears the name of a prolific artist you’ll find in few places. Kate Freeman Clark (1875-1957) was a student of Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase who painted for three decades in both studio and “plein air” and signed her works “Freeman Clark”. In 1923, however, she returned to her family home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and apparently put away paints forever. She never sold any of her art, but gave this piece to the Brooks in its early years. Most of her works are housed in the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery in Holly Springs.
In his lifetime, millions viewed the works of Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931), whose quick hand and sharp eye heralded society life of Paris from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. At the Dixon the special exhibit Jean-Louis Forain: La Comédie parisienne displays 130 of those works including 50 from the museum’s collection.
Forain made his living sketching city life for several Paris publications. Besides producing a sketch nearly every day, he also found time for painting. His use of light and choice of subject, dancers, reflects his friendship with Edgar Degas. While Mary Cassatt painted members of the audience and Degas concentrated on dancers on stage, Forain’s works peek behind curtains to look at dancers’ lives off stage. He also brought pen and brushes to subjects such as the racetrack, cafes, and streets of Paris, working well into the 1920s.
Forain would enjoy stepping outside onto the Dixon grounds. The colorful exuberance of the cutting garden reflects the Impressionists’ natural approach to gardening. Elsewhere the grounds are arranged along formal settings using linear vistas of shrub, fountain, and sculpture, including a pleached allée of European hornbeams that bring a touch of France to Memphis.
For Information: See www.brooksmuseum.org, and www.dixon.org. Admission to the Brooks is $7 for adults, $6 for ages 65 and over, and $3 ages 7 to 17 and students with I.D. You don’t have to see both museums on the same day. For lunch, choose Brushmark Restaurant at the Brooks, or Café Forain at the Dixon.
By Gary D. Ford
September 27, 2011

Beside a two-lane road near Lumpkin, Georgia, a ‘village” rises from the past in a woodland clearing, where time has stopped in the mid-19^th century.  Westville, an assemblage of thirty authentic buildings, portrays life in a Georgia town emerging from the wilderness in 1850. In those structures, swept yards, and sand streets the wood-smoke scented past comes murmuring into the present with the squeak and creak of wheel and harness, the thump of hooves, and voices. If genre painter Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905) happened to stop by, he’d quickly sketch neighbors talking politics in a swept yard, like that of his work here at the Norton, Arguing the Point; Settling the Presidency. Westville, a slip of memory from the vest-pocket of time, also makes me stop, blink twice and listen to the long ago.

I have long admired Westville as a place where modern-day maintenance doesn’t erase all blemishes that would have appeared in the past. Here and there, like any other town hewn from the wilderness, paint peels, cracks fracture a pane of glass, and red clay erodes. Westville, although well kept, doesn’t look too perfect.

“There was not a perfect town in America,” comments Leo Goodsell, director of Westville, with a smile. “Westville has flaws. Every time it rains we’re rebuilding roads. Maintenance has always been a problem for more than a hundred and fifty years.”

Daily, guides lead three tours highlighting village life, business and transportation, and plantation days for both black and white families. Special events add voice, music and activity: Spring in Our Town, 1836 Creek War Re-enactment, July 4^th Celebration, and 1850 Fall Harvest, and Christmas Made Simple.

When I visited recently, a program called Struggles of Secession portrayed the increasingly difficult life on the home front in October of 1863, with living historians of the Southeast Coalition of Authentic Re-enactors spreading through town. Women, wearing homespun dresses, dyed wool in a black brew of walnut hulls in a pot over a wood fire. An ambrotypist set up his studio and clerks in tall hats and linen suits opened the Bank of Westville, while a convalescing soldier, hobbling on wooden crutches, paused to listen to the see saw rhythm of shaped-note singing. He smiled. Home.

Time gets a little mixed up here. The village, named for is founder John Word West, opened in 1970 to portray the culture, crafts and lifestyles of a Georgia town of 1850, in these authentic buildings gathered from around the South: shops, a church, a wooden courthouse, and the only working animal-powered cotton gin in the Southeast. Residences range from single- and double-pen log structures to modest town houses to a grand, two-story Greek Revival home.

Westville’s only “new” structure, a reconstructed slave house, was built from timber grown on the town site. For its occupants, whose work provided comfort for others, life in 1850 was hard. So it was for farmers, housewives, and shopkeepers who contended with the elements, illnesses, and an unpredictable economy. Yet, days came for festive gatherings, and time, as this imperfect town perfectly shows, moved on.

For more information, see www.westville.org.