Bodmer_Publication

direct interaction with Bodmer) continued to look for classical Greek bodies among
the Indians. The tradition continues throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a
next climax in the monumental photographic oeuvre of Edward S. Curtis.
Bodmer’s place in this tradition can be defined with relative ease. His portraits
are generally viewed as instances of a nobilitation of the Indian, and the fact that
he and Maximilian – the latter perhaps even more than Bodmer – were engaged in
a search for a natural aristocracy can easily be deduced from their selection of
portraits. Thus, for example, Bodmer goes to Louisiana in the winter of 1832/33
while the Prince is forced to stay at New Harmony, sick with what may have been a
form of cholera. But the sketches that Bodmer brings home will not be used:
they show Choctaw who had just been driven from their ancestral lands and
whose culture and way of life were threatened with destruction. However, this does
not mean that Wied and Bodmer create a uniform image of “the Indian” per se.
There are also demonizing images of “terrible savages,” and Wied and Bodmer
also encountered the “other” as a potential enemy – Tableau 42 signals as much,
already through the representation of individual figures. The intermittent conflict
between whites and Indians becomes visible in a few of the images, but
much more frequently in Wied’s text. At the same time, however, it becomes evident
from both media that there existed a solid basis of conventions for cultural
exchange between the two sides – this is borne out, for example, by Vignette XXI
that shows the travelers in a ceremonially staged meeting.
The nobilitation announces itself already in the artfully arranged delegation of
Sauk and Fox, who appear to be standing in the winds of history. It becomes palpable
in the image of a young Indian on horseback that seamlessly connects with
the image of medieval knights in Romantic paintings. Quite generally we find that
the horse, which had, after all, been introduced to the societies of the Great Plains
only as late as the eighteenth century, is used as a cultural index for “the Indian” as
such and as an emblem of a positively connoted “savage” life close to nature.
At the same time, the image of the noble savage is not identical with that of the
ethnically “characteristic” Indian for whom Wied, the anthropologist and ethnologist,
is searching. These are two different concerns, which sometimes coincide
but occasionally almost become opposites. Thus there are among the faces in the
double and triple portraits some that cannot be associated with notions of nobility.
At the same time, the way in which they attempt to show similarities of ethnic
or individual “character” helps in interpreting the great nobilitating portraits
as well: here Bodmer applies a representational pattern that is frequently used
in Europe for portraits of families or close-knit groups. He does not treat the Indians
as scientific specimens as do many other artists from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This transfer of conventions can and should be read as an
acknowledgement of a fundamental equality between observer and observed.
Among the great portraits of individuals, those of Mato-Tope and Pehriska-
Ruhpa are special in that these two prominent chiefs, whose open-minded exchange
of knowledge and opinions was of special significance to Wied and Bodmer,
appear twice: once shown with ritually significant attributes that signal difference
to the European observer, and once in the pose of the leader of men, as also is the
case in the portrait of Addih-Hiddisch. The pose of the ruler is part of a European
repertoire of nobilitations. Its prominent use in the illustrations may very well be
due not exclusively to Bodmer, but also to the artists who cut the plates.
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