Memorial Hall & Ogden Art Museum
One is that Gilbert Gaul’s 1888 painting depicting a Union assault on Confederate defenses is being shown in a museum of contemporary art. Another is that more than 50 period artifacts from neighboring Confederate Memorial Hall Museum are exhibited with the painting. The exhibit opened Aug. 1 on the Ogden’s White Linen Night, a festive reduced-admission evening when multiple exhibits were introduced. Artist and writer William Dunlap, who owns the painting, initiated and curated the exhibit in collaboration with Memorial Hall where his friend the historian and writer Winston Groom is a board member. The collaboration is notable because not too many years ago the University of New Orleans (UNO), which was building the Ogden Museum, tried to evict the Confederate museum from Memorial Hall next door. The historic building, which opened in 1891, stands between the new museum building and the art museum’s 1889 Patrick F. Taylor Library, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. The resolution, after a protected legal battle, was to allow UNO to tunnel under Memorial Hall to connect the Ogden buildings. What was supposed to be a three-month project turned into 13 months and Memorial Hall was closed for all of 2008. That would have been bad enough, but the Confederate museum had already been closed for four months after Hurricane Katrina passed nearby on Aug. 29, 2005. Longtime curator Patricia Ricci says the museum reopened four months later; however, attendance plummeted from 25,000 the year before to only 1,800 for the entire year of 2006. But that is all in the past. Ricci and David Houston from the Ogden worked with Dunlap on the Storming the Ramparts exhibit and may work together again. She is pleased at the Ogden’s acknowledgement that the dispute is over. For the Memorial Hall part of the exhibit Dunlap chose artifacts that are represented in the painting and personal items a soldier would have carried. Three of the museum’s large Victorian-era cases with artifacts add to the period feeling. Two war logs from Chickamauga Battlefield that still bear a James shell, shrapnel and grapeshot are mounted at the sides of the painting. Two interesting uniforms are in the display. Maj. D.C. Merwin, of the Madison Light Artillery of Louisiana, also known as Moody’s Battery and Madison Tips, for Tipperarys, lost his arm in battle, as his bloodstained jacket attests. John Dolan of Austin’s Battalion Louisiana Sharpshooters survived four years of war and surrendered in Meridian, Miss., on May 18, 1865. He wrote who he was and the date of each battle inside his jacket. The exhibit includes artifacts such as cartridge boxes, boots, surgeon’s kit, knapsack, guns, Bibles, housewives, daguerreotypes of women and children, a mess kit, drumsticks, canteen, projectiles and a foot officer’s sword. The Ogden Museum produced an exhibit brochure in which Dunlap, Groom and museum director J. Richard Gruber discussed the painting, the artist and postwar renditions of Civil War scenes and the new relationship between the museums. Dunlap’s essay told how he fell under the spell of the painting’s panoramic battle scene, which he described as “cinematic in scope and content.” (A later print of the painting was titled “Taking the Ramparts.”) He wrote of the exhibit’s aim: “Those of us who envisioned and worked on this exhibition hope that by bringing together the strengths of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Confederate Memorial Hall Museum, a greater truth about the individual missions of both institutions could be told. Art and artifact of equal value have a mutual story to tell. By looking at and thinking about one, we gain insights into the other.” Groom noted that Gaul’s scene appears to show Union attacks on Rebel defenses at Petersburg, but it also could have been Atlanta, Vicksburg or Port Hudson. Which battle it was doesn’t matter and didn’t matter to Gaul. “Instead, the frantic immediacy of the infantry charge, and the desperation of the defense, seems all that Gaul wants us to know,” Groom wrote. “His subject was a war that in its time rent the very fabric of the American nation and continues to echo down the years for better or for worse.” The exhibit continues through Jan. 3. Ogden Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursdays. For information, call (504) 539-9600, or go to www.ogdenmuseum.org. |
