Bodmer_Publication

Introduction by the Curator
Hartwig Isernhagen
This exhibition does not attempt to give a full account of Bodmer’s or Wied’s
separate achievements. Rather, its aim is to deal with the intersection of the artist’s
and the explorer’s lives that produced the Reise in das innere Nord-America –
a work that occupies a prominent place in the history of European perceptions of
American Indians.
That travel book and its illustrations could also be discussed in other contexts,
such as the development of Bodmer, the artist, and his oeuvre, or that of the scientist
Wied, and his. It would be profitable to talk about its place in the history of the
ethnology and historiography of North America. Here, in this exhibition, its context
is first and foremost the story how Central Europe encountered North America
and its indigenous populations. The other aspects named will occasionally become
so relevant that we cannot evade them. But at the center of the exhibition will be
the question of the encounter with the “other”; it will provide whatever coherence
the exhibition will have.
The next few pages will offer a survey of the exhibition and its trajectory which
should also make for profitable reading for those that have not seen the objects.
It will be followed by the analysis of three aspects that deserve special attention:
Wied’s collections, which do not only provide the “sources” for many images, but
that are important within the history of European ethnological collections and as
contemporary sources of knowledge for indigenous people; Bodmer’s sketches
as the basis of “natural-historical” illustrations that have dominated the Euro -
pean image of Indians to this day; and the relation between science and art, as it
informs the images in this exhibition.
This is not an art exhibition in the narrow sense of the term. We do not, therefore,
distinguish between the two twentieth-century reprints that were drawn from
the original plates (Leipzig and Alecto) and the original prints (Koblenz/Paris/
London). Nor do we discuss the various states of the latter editions, which can be
consulted in the monumental work edited by Ruud (2004).
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