U.S. Civil War Shown Through Pioneering Art, Photos

More than 150 years after the opening salvoes of the American Civil War, the grim reality of the conflict is laid bare in a U.S. exhibit showcasing the pioneering photos and art of the time.

The 1861-1865 war, considered the world's first modern conflict, was the first to be captured from start-to-finish through the new medium of photography.

"For the first time, Americans were seeing American dead bodies," senior curator Eleanor Jones Harvey told reporters ahead of the opening of the exhibit last week at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

"The Civil War and American Art" includes 18 original photographs as well as 57 paintings by artists including Winslow Homer and Frederic Edwin Church.

Two days after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 -- in which 23,000 people were killed, injured or reported missing and presumed dead -- Alexander Gardner shot a series of searing photos depicting rows of dead bodies near a cannon, or the body of a lone shooter left in a trench.

Just a month later, the photos attracted crowds at an exhibit in New York, where a reviewer noted that "by the aid of the magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished" -- a novelty at the time.

"One of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies," said the reviewer.

Gardner's photos of the Battle of Gettysburg a year later were seen by then-president Abraham Lincoln 10 days before his legendary Gettysburg Address, a speech recognizing the sacrifices of both sides.

"What do you paint when you don't know who is going to win, how long it's going to last or what happens next?" asked Jones Harvey.

Beyond the battlefield photographs, Jones Harvey said she was looking for landscapes and other paintings depicting scenes from everyday life to show how these two forms of art "captured the transformative impact of the war."

In Winslow Homer's "Prisoners from the Front," a Northern general stares down three captured Southern soldiers, while in "A Visit from the Old Mistress," a white woman faces three of her former female slaves.

The tension is palpable in all the featured works and "the war is not truly over," explained Jones Harvey.

Other works in the exhibit depict fugitive slaves attacked by dogs in the marshes of Virginia, or a soldier collecting himself before the hastily dug grave of a comrade.

In 1863, in the middle of the war, Sanford Robinson Gifford painted "A Coming Storm," which shows an idyllic autumnal countryside darkened by ominous clouds.

Put on display shortly after Lincoln's assassination in 1865, as a symbol of the nation's grief, it still bears the name of its original owner -- actor Edwin Booth, the brother of Lincoln's killer John Wilkes Booth.

The exhibit will run in Washington through April 28, 2013. It will then move to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a summer 2013 run.