Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm
Abstract
Through plein-air drawings and studio works on paper, this essay grapples with processes of national belonging and exclusion brought to bear on the surfaces of extant public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. ‘Whitewash’ is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. Similarly, an exploration of the fate of two representations of the U.S. Confederate general Robert E. Lee reveals the nationalist, political forces that led to these monuments’ raising and subsequent removal. The first monument considered here is a portrait bust of the general that was removed in 2017 from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Bronx Community College, and the second is the graffiti added to the base of Lee’s equestrian statue, removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, in 2021. The portrait bust was drawn in plein-air, both present and absent. The graffiti added to monuments as a step in their removal emerged as a pivotal element in studio works on paper representing the fate of Lee monuments and similar objects.
Citation: Skrill, Howard. “Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/whitewash [date of access]
“...if one can successfully portray one’s political enemies as unqualified to claim association to the national totem, as being fundamentally opposed to its values and ideals, this amounts to the ultimate political victory, the absolute negation of their political legitimacy.” Steven J. Mock in “Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity”.
Image 1: Lee Richmond Graffiti 29" x 21", ink, gesso, graphite and colored pencil, pastel on watercolor paper, 2020. Image courtesy of Howard Skrill.
The artworks in this essay titled “Whitewash”[i] are my attempts at recording “absences” and grappling with processes of national belonging through the covering and revealing of public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. Whitewash is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. This process is conceptually central to my practice, conjuring the visual reality of the “New American Iconoclasm”. I have been creating plein-air, studio works on paper since 2011, for my art project, the Anna Pierrepont Series; an exploration of the afterlife of public monuments with an enduring interest in iconoclasm.[ii]
In ‘the New Iconoclasm’, Confederate monuments in the 2010s became “a key site of protest against violent oppression of African Americans, prompting the most important season of American iconoclasm since the destruction of the equestrian statue of George III in 1776.” (Brown 2019, 283) An iconoclastic tsunami, and not just a season, followed George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 leading to widescale Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the U.S. In this essay, I begin this essay with the removal of the Confederate monument of Robert E. Lee in the Bronx. Drawing on Gamboni’s (1997, 23) influential analysis of iconoclasm as it unfolds in the modern era, distinguishes iconoclasms ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Iconoclasms from above are when established powers remove representations from public spaces. These events are typically celebrated as milestone moments in communal history. Iconoclasms from below are typically denounced as ‘vandalism’. The removals of Lee monuments in the Bronx, Richmond and elsewhere are iconoclastic. The raising and removal of these monuments also reveals the ebb and flow of power applied in public spaces.
During the overnight hours of August 18th, 2017, and in reaction to the murderous violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, yellow-vested work crews removed two bronze portrait bust likenesses of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans on the campus of Bronx Community College (BCC)[iii] in Bronx, New York (Rosenberg, 2017).[iv] A bust of the 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born palaeontologist who professed deeply racist opinions, remains in the hall. The removals left two empty orange plinths speckled with blue facing each other on either side of the narrow walkway of the arcade. Nearly all the other plinths remain occupied with portrait likenesses of other ‘Great Americans’ nestled between the regularly spaced columns. The hall was constructed on a promontory and the absence of the bust of Jackson on its exterior wall enables an unobstructed view of the Harlem River and Hudson Highlands extending far into the distance.
The “Bronx Lee” was installed decades earlier than that of Jackson. Removing it enables an unencumbered view of the rear of the Gould Memorial Library, the campus’ most iconic building. A bronze portrait likeness of the Marquis de Lafayette peeks out from a niche built into the drum of the circular and domed library that the hall wraps around like a girdle. The bronze words New York University are also attached to the drum near the bust of Lafayette incongruously announcing the campus to be that of NYU and not BCC.[v]
Image 2: Absence of the Portrait Bust of Robert E. Lee from Bronx Community College, 20” x 17” oil stick, oil pastel, chalk pastel, graphite and colored pencil on linen board, ©2017 [plein-air]. Image courtesy of Howard Skrill.
To better grasp the forces surrounding the removal of Bronx Lee let us consider how representations of the General acquired their power. An equestrian statue of Lee was raised on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia in 1890 decades after he had surrendered the Confederate cause in Appomattox, Virginia in 1865. The statue was the largest of the monuments on the Avenue with Lee and his horse raised aloft on an enormous white base; the majority of monuments on Monument Avenue featured men on horseback in military uniforms. The equestrian type celebrated institutionalized violence since antiquity, and these figures were evoked in the mounted legions of the Ku Klux Klan that terrorized the Jim Crow South.
What did Lee’s equestrian statue symbolize in the context of being on the losing side in the American Civil War? Raising a monument to its principal general in its ruined former Capitol (with victors’ consent) signalled that extant racial hierarchies would be maintained (Savage, 1997, 128-135) despite a population of newly emancipated and enfranchised slaves that was roughly equivalent to the white population. The statue of the general suggested institutional sanction (including that of the US government) in the social exclusion and extrajudicial violence that the former Confederates visited upon the newly emancipated. The emancipated were precluded from robustly participating in social institutions while being compelled to participate in public rituals paying homage to their oppressors, often under the monument’s imposing shadows. Since the “Richmond Lee” was of a man who exercised violence professionally, the threat of violence to maintain this coercive and corrosive order was likewise projected. Furthermore, the monument elevated Lee to a mystical status, thus joining a well-established American pantheon that also included General George Washington. The alchemic transformation of Lee from traitor and invader to hero led to his bronze likeness being included in a Hall of American Fame, ten years hence, deep inside his adversaries’ territory.
Image 3: Portrait Bust of Robert E. Lee from Bronx Community College, 14” x 17” oil pastel on paper, ©2014 [plein-air]. Image courtesy of Howard Skrill.
Monuments carry enormous symbolic significance and are installed typically in “sites of memory (Nora,1989) in the built environment: parks, traffic islands and public plazas of towns and cities. As a result, particularly in modernity with the advent of Nationalism, these often-imposing objects become popular gathering spots for public demonstrations.
Confederate monument building in the aftermath of the American Civil War was one element in an entire system that Connerton (2009, 29) would describe as massive denial, such denial being an essential component enabling whitewash’s application. Connerton was speaking in the context of World War I’s aftermath in Germany where Germans were engaged in ‘gigantic gymnastic performances’. These spectacles drew attention away from the ‘indigestible fact’ of the thousands of mutilated war survivors haunting the country’s public places. In the Civil War’s aftermath, similarly, the former enslaved and the mutilated survivors from that unsuccessful war were an ‘indigestible fact” likewise subject to “massive denial´ enabled by the performative vigour needed to the raise the towering ‘Richmomd Lee’ in the heart of Richmond.
As the Richmond Lee rose, the urban places surrounding the monument, having been reduced to ruin in the Civil War’s final days, were rebuilt. Systematic legal bias and discriminatory policing-maintained stasis for generations in these rebuilt spaces. Denied freedom, enfranchisement and opportunity in the shadow of the Richmond Lee, the emancipated fled in great waves from Richmond and elsewhere in the former Confederacy to the North and West. The systematic intolerance they experienced in the Richmond Lee’s shadow followed them to their new homes with idealized representations of Lee following close behind. This included a campus in New York City’s poorest and most diverse borough, Bronx Community College, where I worked for a decade. My father also attended this campus when it was NYU; my great grandfather fleeing oppression in Europe, had emigrated to the Bronx in the late 1800s.
Public spaces where monuments are typically erected reflect factional power (rationalized by selective remembering, embroidering and forgetting). Building upon Lefebvre’s (1992) description of central and peripheral places in the constructed environment, factions once occupying central places are often relegated by shifts in power to the margins as the previously marginalized seize or are awarded a central position. These competing factions utilize forgetting and remembering similarly but apply radically different scripts while monuments constructed by the former rarely survive the imposition of a new order by the latter.
Image 4: Lee Floating (Traveler), 29 ½” x 22 ½”, ink, gesso, graphite and colored pencil, pastel on watercolor paper, 2022 (Midway Journal, July 2022). Image courtesy of Howard Skrill.
The Richmond Lee met the fate of the Bronx Lee on September 8th, 2021 (Dennis 2021); its passage to oblivion live streamed and observed by crowds of onlookers. The Lee was sliced in two parts at the midriff.[vi] Loins and legs still affixed to the horse as the torso temporarily floated above supported by straps hanging from a crane. Both sections were lowered onto the flatbed trailer and carted away.[vii] Three years before Richmond, in February 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia instituted iconoclasm from above by ordering that mounted likenesses of Lee and Jackson be removed. In the weekend of August 17th-18th, 2017, protesters gathered in Charlottesville to protest the pending removals. Three people died as a result with Heather Heyer, a counter-protester, murdered by a protester intentionally driving his car into a gathering of counter-protesters.
The most remarkable aspect of this New Iconoclasm is the coordination taking place between iconoclasts from above and below. The ‘Unite the Right’ protesters in Charlottesville clearly recognized this coordination as a direct threat to their long dominant status in the American polity. During the election campaign of 2020, the Trump administration and campaign made common cause with the historically dominant by painting the New Iconoclasm as historically ignorant vandalism. Yet it is those who support the removals who are transforming American sites of memory as with the anonymous author of ‘Amerikkka’. The violence in Charlottesville suggests that the protesters and those that support them will not willingly disappear into the shadows since their identities had long granted them primacy in the US, inviting a destructive wrath extending far beyond public monuments.
‘AmeriKKKa’ inscribed on the Lee base provides evidence of a critical mass of Americans experiencing a paradigm shift that also propelled the removal of the Lee in the Bronx two years earlier. Our current moment has also witnessed the systematic removal of confederate monuments throughout the country. The 2020 protests propelled millions of Americans to recognize the ossified nature of the Richmond Lee. The Richmond Lee, due to its scale and central placement in the former Confederate Capitol and on an avenue dedicated to Confederate heroes, was by far the most significant removal during the period of New American Iconoclasm. The myriad marks added to the surfaces of the Lee are the product of modern day Luthers, appending an avalanche of indictments to formally pristine surfaces. The Lee base evolved quickly into such a charged surface thus receiving an avalanche of testimonials to the grief arising from generations of marginalization and violent oppression. In 2022, I created a studio work on paper, Lee(Amerikkka), of the Lee monument in Richmond. Amerikkka scrubs away the whitewash of the postbellum American system by conflating the nation as a totality with the KKK. The KKK practiced domestic terror as elaborate ritualized performances enabled by the Richmond Lee’s massive presence.
Image 5: Lee (AmeriKKKa), 30” x 22 ½”, ink, gesso, graphite and colored pencil, pastel on watercolor paper, 2022. Image courtesy of Howard Skrill.
The Civil War’s aftermath provided an opportunity for a reshuffling of the spaces of dominance and periphery in the postbellum south between the former enslaved and their former enslavers. Whitewash with public monuments at its core, forestalled this transformation.The whitewash was so effective for so long that in 2014, I could draw the shadowy contours of mid-day light falling on Lee’s visage in the dim confines of the hall without a single thought to why he was included in the first instance. General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Lee’s most capable subordinate, was added decades later to the hall. Both likenesses stood for decades across from General and President Ulysses S. Grant and near President Abraham Lincoln whose bust is situated closer to the founding fathers.
When I drew Lee in 2014, I never imagined in the years that followed that a place like the hall, a monument to the idea of American greatness that had fallen into ruin when NYU sold the campus to CUNY and the college became BCC, would emerge as a flash point for contemporary identity politics. I dutifully recorded the absences of the busts and plaques in a drawing and a painting during two trips to the Bronx in late August 2017. The hasty removals added to the declining appearance of the long-ignored hall. Such ghostly echoes hover over the dismantled Monument Avenue. Whitewash is an exercise of communal delusion and is therefore intrinsically unstable. Iconoclastic toppling and the ruin that follows are inevitable.
The artist who inscribed ‘Amerikkka’ on the Lee established him or herself as an arbiter of American identity by deftly synthesizing the American ideal with the racial animus that haunts this ideal, stripping away generations of the carefully layered whitewash. This person thus set a new boundary marker of American national identity that consigns those refusing to acknowledge this reciprocity as outside the virtuous circle of national belonging. The hall at its inception set one boundary marker for American national identity. The addition of Amerikkka to the Lee’s base and the Lee’s subsequent eviction (regrettably with ‘Amerikkka’ along with it) suggest a new one.
References
Brown, Thomas J., Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019
Connerton, Paul, How Modernity Forgets, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009
Crisp, Lindsay P., “Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol”, The Jugaad Project, Mar. 2021, [thejugaadproject.pub/breaking-down-colston, last accessed 2-26-23]
Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997
Hall of Fame for Great Americans, n.d., in Wikipedia [https://site.bcc.cuny.edu/HallOfFame/last accessed 2-26-23]
Heneghan, Bridget T. Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination, University Press of Mississippi, 2003
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, New York: Wily-Blackwell, 1992
Mock, Steven J., Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012
Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”, Representations, [Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory], Volume 0, Issue 26, Spring, 1989, pages 7-24
Rosenberg, Zoe, Confederate general busts at Bronx Community College will be removed (updated), CurbedNY, 8/17/17 [https://ny.curbed.com/2017/8/16/16158414/bronx-community-college-confederate-busts-nyc, last accessed 11-24-22]
Savage, Kirk, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997
Skrill, Howard, 2017a, ‘Teetering’ Streetlight Blog [https://streetlightmag.com/2017/08/27/teetering-drawings-by-howard-skrill, last accessed 4-1-18]
Skrill, Howard, Evicting Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Art Is On, No. 5, 2017b, pgs. 168-177
Notes
[i] The idea of whitewashing as a socio-political and aesthetic means of understanding race has been used previously in diverse contexts in the U.S. For instance, see Heneghan (2003) for how whiteness in artefacts literally constituted power in antebellum material culture.
[ii] See www.howardskrill.blogspot.com, www.fairfield.edu/museum/skrill, and https://www.terrain.org/2021/arterrain/howard-skrill/. Also, see Skrill (2017a, 2017b).
[iii] I was an Adjunct Professor in the Arts department at BCC for a decade and my father attended the campus when it was NYU. I had the opportunity to create numerous plein-air images of the portrait busts in the hall, including that of the Lee. Although I no longer work on campus, I returned on a number of occasions to record, in plein air, the absences of the Lee and Jackson from the hall.
[iv] The removals were undertaken at the direction of the former Governor of the State of New York, Andrew Cuomo (exercising his managerial authority as the titular head of the Dormitory Authority of New York that is under State control and that manages the physical infrastructure of the College) although the college is part of the City University of New York and its employees are paid by New York City and not New York State.
[v] The summary of the Hall’s origin and purpose can be found at https://site.bcc.cuny.edu/HallOfFame/, last accessed 2-26-23.
[vi] The Lee monument’s fate has parallels with that of the statue of the slave trader and merchant, Edward Colston, in Bristol, England, in June 2020. The large, bronze statue was deplinthed and thrown into the harbour amid the widespread BLM protests (discussed in Crisp 2021).
[vii] I created two works on papers documenting this novel moment, and one was exhibited in France in Fall 2021.
