Art 108 Study Guide



Black and White in America

Frances Pohl

America as an African Invention

1. What is the basis for Pohl’s argument that “America” is an African invention? List the historical facts.

2. What is the myth believed by Eurpean Americans that justified the enslavement and exploitation of Africans and African Americans? How does it compare with the myths about Native Americans that justified Manifest Destiny?

3. How did the stereotypes of Africans and African Americans change during the Civil War?

4. What role did artists play in constructing and deconstucting these myths?

5. When did the Civil War begin and end?

6. What was Leutze’s position on slavery and how is it evident in the final version of Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way for the federal Capitol building?

7. What stereotypes appear in Quilting Frolic (1813) by John Krimmel? How are they represented visually? What were Krimmel’s artistic sources?

8. How dominant was this stereotypical representation of African Americans in the first half of the 19th century and what artistic representations challenged it at the time?

9. Define “physiognomical distortion” and “phrenology.”

10. Compare the representations of African and African Americans by Krimmel and Nathaniel Jocelyn. How can we SEE their messages?

11. Who was Cinque, the subject of Jocelyn’s portrait by that name?

12. What was the response to Jocelyn’s depiction of Cinque?

13. How did the abolitionist movement help Robert Scott Duncanson? What was Duncanson’s primary subject?

14. Explain the narrative and literary source for Duncanson’s Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853)

15. Compare Duncanson’s painting with the wood engraving by Hammatt Billings. Where did the engraving appear?

16. What does Little Eva symbolize? What is the etymology of “patronizing”?

17. How was Uncle Tom seen by Harriet Beecher Stowe and other Euro-American abolitionists and how was he seen by many or most African Americans? How do you think Duncanson saw him?

18. How did Nat Turner, John Brown, and the possibility of a slave revolt affect the course of events? Who was John Brown? How are these tensions visually evident in John Roger’s sculpture, Slave Auction (1859)?

19. What was the message of Slave Auction and who would have bought the copies of it?

20. Describe the narrative and message of Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life in the South. What accounts for the range of skin colors depicted?

21. Was Johnson’s painting a success? Why?

African Americans and the Civil War

22. Who was John Little and how did he explain the “happiness” of slaves?

23. When was the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed and what does it state?

24. Describe the narratives and meanings of Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty and Theordor Kaufmann’s On to Liberty. How do the paintings compare with Old Kentucy Home?

25. How did African Americans serve the North in the war? What was “war contraband”?

26. How were lives of African Americans in the Union army portrayed differently in photography than in engravings or paintings?

27. What was the audience for stereographic war photography?

28. Compare Winslow Homer’s early illustrations for Harper’s Weekly and his later paintings overall. Give specific examples.

29. Who was Thomas Nast? When did he come to the US and from where? What was his political position, evident in Entrance of the 55th Massachusetts? What are the figures for the number of African Americans who joined the Union army and worked in Union camps?

Images of Reconstruction: Prisoners from the Front and Visit from the Old Mistress:

30. When was the Reconstruction Period and what had happened by 1900?

31. How does Homer’s Prisoners from the Front (1866) address the tensions and accomodations of the Reconstruction Era? What is the narrative of the painting? How does Pohl interpret its meaning? How did Sordello (Benson) interpret it for the New York Evening Post in April 1866?

32. Does Homer’s Prisoners from the Front represent brotherhood among Northern and Southern EuroAmericans and betrayal of African Americans?

33. Compare Homer’s Visit from the Old Mistress (1876) with his Prisoners from the Front (1866)

The African American Artist at Home and Abroad: Edmonia Lewis and Henry Osawa Tanner:

34. What is Edmonia Lewis’s background? How did she come to be an accomplished artist? How did she get to Rome and who was in her circle of artists there?

35. Compare Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains with Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave.

36. Explain the narrative and symbolic meaning of Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (1867) What is the medium? Where was the work created?

37. How did Lewis show her art in the US? How was she described by the press?

38. What is the content of Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter (1872)

39. What is Henry Osawa Tanner’s background?

40. Compare Thomas Eakin’s representations of African Americans with Tanner’s. Give specific examples.

41. How does The Banjo Lesson (1893) by Tanner speak to the theme of education? What is the significance of the banjo and how the child is learning to play it?

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