Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Through May 23
We’re all familiar with history paintings that depict “the momentous events that gave rise to America,” said Sandra Barrera in the Pasadena, Calif., Star-News. Images like Washington Crossing the Delaware are as important to the country’s sense of its heritage as the “Star-Spangled Banner.” A different sort of history painting, however, is now the subject of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Some 70 works “show fleeting moments in the lives of ordinary people” from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Humorous scenes abound of village markets and election days, “when booze appears to buy votes.” William McGregor Paxton’s 1911 The Breakfast features a young woman “sulking as her husband buries himself in the morning paper.” William Sidney Mount’s 1845 Eel Spearing at Setauket shows a child happily fishing with a family slave.
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Mount’s jarring canvas reminds us of the contradictions inherent in “a slave-owning nation founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. It can be fascinating to tease out themes of race, class, and gender that run just below many paintings’ surfaces. That said, too many works here “tell us bits of interesting social history via flat-footed painting.” The few masters represented—Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer—really stand out. Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field, created just after Lincoln’s assassination, captures a “haunting image of a farmer scything a vast wheat field beneath a bright blue sky.” His Union uniform sits nearby; he was among the Civil War’s victors. Yet he looks like a “grim reaper”—or, in any case, a man permanently scarred by all the death he’s seen.
