cover image Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in Southern Art

Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in Southern Art

Estill Curtis Pennington. Peachtree Publishers, $50 (200pp) ISBN 978-0-934601-92-4

While some early painters of the American South reinforced stereotypes of blacks, others realistically depicted the inhumanity of slavery and the deep fissures of a class society. Many of the 94 works reproduced here are powerfully affecting. Seth Eastman's portrait of Seminole Chief Wildcat held in captivity crystallizes the shame of white society's depredation of the American Indian. Fanny Palmer's hand-colored Currier & Ives lithographs present the horrors of war. From the cavalier poses of gentlemen sitters to symbolist visions of crumbling mansions, the Southern painting reproduced here displays an extensive range. In an excellent survey that expands our knowledge of American art and of Southern culture, Pennington, a curator at the New Orleans Museum of Art, examines a tradition that has swung between confrontation with reality and sentimental clinging to an idealized past. (Dec.)