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Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. By Kirk Savage. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 270. $35.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.)
Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves is a welcome contribution to the history of public sculpture in America. The book examines the surging interest in erecting commemorative monuments after the Civil War and the centrality of sculpture in expressing new ideals of nationhood and freedom in postbellum society. Savage's inquiry focuses on the artistic and cultural problems that the medium of sculpture posed to the representation of the black American.
The challenge for Savage is the dearth of existing images of black figures in nineteenth-century public sculpture. Savage negotiates this difficulty by delving into archival records for unrealized commissions as well as for those rare few completed public monuments of African Americans, whether slaves, emancipated black men and women, allegorical figures, or black soldiers. Savage enriches his study of the sculpted black figure with an analysis of commemorative images of white Civil War heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and what Savage identifies as the standard citizen-soldier.
In a lucid and well-crafted narrative, Savage untangles the convoluted histories of the monument projects in his study. His story suggests that planning commissions were often undermined by their own contradictory goals and aspirations for the monuments they hoped to build. Savage's work offers a compelling argument about the cultural meanings of sculpture in the public commemoration of the war.
Savage first provides a brief discussion of the conventional modes of representing black figures in nineteenth-century popular and fine art. The chapters that follow address sculptural representation and are organized by subject matter: slavery (memorialized both explicitly and implicitly), emancipation, freedom, and Civil War soldiers. For each of the commemorative projects that he discusses, Savage weaves together his own careful readings of the extant visual materials with a range of primary documents-official commission records, artist correspondence, the public reaction to the sculpture...