Picturing Each Other

There is perhaps no other region so intrinsically associated with the term
“frontier” as the American west. The lure of picturing such a land and its
indigenous peoples drew a young Swiss watercolorist, Johann Karl Bodmer, and
his employer, Prince Maximilian Alexander Philipp of Wied-Neuwied—a
respected naturalist mentored by Alexander von Humboldt—to the western
territories of the United States. Navigating with reproductions of maps from the
Lewis and Clark expedition, Maximilian and Bodmer traveled up the Missouri
River to present-day Montana in 1833-34, spending five months on the land
where the Mandan had long made their home. This talk will center on Bodmer’s
image of two Mandan warriors, Síh-Chidä (“Yellow Feather”) and Máhchsi-
Karéhde (“Flying War Eagle”), and Síh-Chidä’s own paintings produced at the
same time. Bodmer and Síh-Chidä would each adopt the role of artist and sitter,
their works raising questions about authorship and self-fashioning, masculinity
and performance, in this space of contact. Looking at Bodmer’s later aquatints,
produced to accompany Maximilian’s account of the voyage, enables us to see
how such moments of intercultural artistic exchange and appropriation are
translated into a more stable ethnographic narrative for Euro-American
audiences, framed by landscapes that emphasize distance and alterity, the
frontier as a space apart, rather than as an intimate site of complex negotiations
between artists and their worlds.