Bodmer_Publication

sketches and watercolors of people, landscapes, and animals. His true-to-detail
drawings and paintings, from which later the prints for the travel journal were
produced, remain unsurpassed to this day and rank as highlights in the pictorial
representation of ‘other’ peoples. Above all, they belong to the most significant
early sources on the Native American cultures of the upper Missouri River.
Next to Bodmer’s superb visual documentation, the travelers brought back with
them several other precious items such as the painted buffalo robes which today
rank among the most significant examples of male pictography from the Native
Tribes of the Great Plains and Prairies. These and other precious objects collected
during the expedition are today held by the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin and
the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart. For the first time in more than a century a
s election of these rare artifacts has been reassembled for the current exhibition in
Zurich where they are being shown to a wide audience for six months. In com bination
with the substantial visual material it is the most comprehensive exhibition
on the travel work of the German natural scientist and the Zurich artist ever
to be shown in Europe.
The show makes an old wish come true, not only for the North America Native
Museum (NONAM) but also for three of the most renowned European specialists
on the work of Wied and Bodmer. Among these are Hartwig Isernhagen from Basel,
who is not only the curator of the current exhibition but who actually, from the
start, gave the project a scope that reaches well beyond the narrow confines of
anthropology, as well as Sonja Schierle and Peter Bolz, the curators of the North
America Departments at the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart and the Museum of
Ethnology in Berlin respectively. Apart from providing a solid ethnological foundation
to the project, we are indebted to Sonja Schierle and Peter Bolz for making
it possible that the precious items from Prince Maximilian’s original collection
have found their way to Zurich; pieces, one should add, that are loaned to other
institutions only very rarely, if ever at all. I should like to thank all three of them
for their unfailing collaboration and for their great commitment to the project.
By way of this successful cooperation Karl Bodmer is now finally able to take pride
of place in Zurich, a recognition he would actually have deserved long ago.
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