Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn/Winter 2008

(Excerpts from the article by Tom McLaughlin) It was only when the United States of America was securely established from the coasts of the Atlantic to the Pacific that there began to be an intellectual and academic interest in the aboriginal peoples who had been displaced by the nation's prolonged nascence. There is undoubtedly an inverse ratio between this kind of dispassionate interest and the fear engendered by close contact. As the indigenous population ceased to be a danger and an obstacle, it became increasingly more interesting to the new inhabitants of the land. This change in perspective also required a diminishment of the white man's racial hubris, a process that itself had had a long history. Today, we as Euro-Americans find ourselves part of a technologically astounding culture but looking nostalgically to the cultures we destroyed for the spiritual élan we lack.
Objective or scientific interest in races and ethnic groups developed during the Enlightenment and has grown ever since. Maximilian, prince of Wied-Neuwied (1772–1867), an aristocratic natural scientist and explorer, was far enough away from the Indians of the North American Plains to take an interest in them as people per se. He was a great admirer of Alexander von Humboldt, who was both friend and mentor, and a student of Johann Blumenbach, the Enlightenment's leading anthropologist. After fighting in the Napoleonic Wars, Maximilian led an expedition to the jungles of Brazil. The result was a two-volume work titled Reise nach Brasilien in den jahren 1815 bis 1817 (1820–1821), the illustrations for which were after Maximilian's own drawings. These illustrations, though competent, bring to light by contrast the extraordinary accomplishment of Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), the artist Maximilian brought with him on his second expedition to America in 1832. Where Maximilian's natives are generic Amazonian tribespeople, Bodmer's renderings depict authentic individuals, particular people rather than ethnographic specimens. These were first published as aquatints in Maximilian's >Reise in das innere Nord-America in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834 (1839–41), which recounted their travels among the Sioux, Mandan, Hidatsa, Mintari, Arikara, Crow, and Blackfoot in the upper Missouri River region.
Bodmer's original artwork consisted of drawings and watercolors, which were later rendered by a variety of artists into aquatint engravings, sometimes colored, for publication. They were first published in conjunction with Maximilian's account by Coblenz and London (Paris, 1839–42). A second edition from the original copper plates was published seven decades later by Schmidt and Guenther (Leipzig, 1922).