Two images of George Washington hang side-by-side at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. On the left, in a Civil War era print, he’s framed by clouds, looking almost saintlike. On the right, in a contemporary piece, his portrait has been melted and placed on a large stick.
The images are part of an ongoing exhibition at the Hood Museum titled “Revolution Reconsidered: History, Myth, and Propaganda” that explores the evolving use of the Revolutionary War in American art and imagery.
Elizabeth Rice Mattison, the exhibition's co-curator, said the installation is meant to explore fundamental questions about the country’s past and present.
“How is the American Revolution constantly being reconsidered?” she said. “Not only by everyday people, but also being crafted by artists themselves over time, and the ways in which those intersect with ideas of American history, of the mythology of the United States, and, of course, with propaganda over the centuries.”
In the 18th century, Mattison said, part of that propaganda was the idea of a ragtag militia that beat the British military. Or in the 1940s, it was using the ideas of the American Revolution to recruit for the fight against Nazi Germany.
She pointed to one World War II recruiting poster with the dates 1778 and 1943 and the words, “Americans will always fight for liberty.” On one side, there are images of soldiers in Revolutionary clothes. On the other, soldiers in World War II military outfits.
“It's such a seemingly simple work that this poster is doing, but connecting that moment, 1778 — that's the year the French joined the American Revolution — to that present day World War II moment,” Mattison explained. “This is one of those ways in which the Revolution never really ceases to be an image or an idea in our imagination, but becomes this constant touchstone, this motivating factor, this rallying cry for Americans over time.”
NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Barnett spoke with Mattison at the Hood Museum, where the exhibition is among several others that the museum is hosting to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Transcript
As you and your colleagues were putting this together, what kinds of ideas did you want to explore and what questions did you want to raise for people who came to visit?
As we worked together as a team of curators and each of us coming with different perspectives on the United States, [and] different educational backgrounds as well, we sat together as a group to think about: What are the core objects in our collection that speak to the history of the United States in ways that are celebratory, that are critical, that are questioning, and how can we bring those together?
We started to look through the collections. Oh my gosh, we have so many images of George Washington, from the heroic to the absolutely ridiculous, particularly from our current perspective.
I might actually point us out to a print just across the wall from us. It features George Washington in a bank of clouds rising up, titled The Spirit of the Union. [It’s] something that's made right at the cusp of the Civil War.
So we have this almost Jesus-like representation of George Washington, like he's a saint, which to our modern eyes seems really kind of fantastical and a little bit silly. But for that particular moment in the 19th century, [it] did so much work of looking back to the revolutionary moment to bring people together.
And so those kinds of stories we really wanted to bring out as a curatorial team, to think about, how are objects doing the work of creating our sense of the United States and what it means today.
Imagery from the Revolutionary War is quite patriotic, right? We find ourselves in this era where patriotism is quite polarized. Some people might not even feel it aligns with them to fly an American flag anymore. How does that patriotism translate to this moment we find ourselves in today?
I might even like to have us go look at an object around the corner. We're looking at Valerie Haggerty's George Washington on a Stick from 2006, which plays on Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait of George Washington. Of course, now it's been melted, tarred, standing up on a very delicate, fragile stick, pointing to this kind of disillusionment, but also deconstruction of the images that we might in previous centuries have accepted unquestioningly. We can still recognize it's Washington, but can we now look at this portrait without thinking about Washington's legacy that's often not spoken about?
For instance, that for Indigenous peoples, he was known as the town destroyer because of his destruction of Indigenous settlements, for instance. And so having Hagerty's work here, right next to that very celebratory 19th-century image The Spirit of the Union does a lot of work to have our visitors think about: How should we perhaps look again, look anew, look differently, and question the idea of the past that so many of these images worked so hard to formulate?
And when it comes to your visitors, what have you been hearing from them?
We have had a number of visitors coming to really think back on American history. Hagerty's work in particular has allowed people to think back about these objects as not necessarily neutral images circulating in space, but active participants in creating our sense of history. And we love it when visitors come and have a conversation with a work of art. That's what objects can do for us, more so than just having a conversation face to face, it's so much easier to talk about difficult subjects when we have an object triangulating that conversation for us.
