Friday Seminar – ‘Anthropology, Sciences and Racial Thinking: An Approach to the German Romantic Depiction of Ancient Inhabitants of Chile Throughout the 19th Century’
Friday 8 February
At 4.30 p.m.
Location: VO44
Speaker: Miguel Gaete Caceres
Chair: Marte Stinis
Johann Moritz Rugendas, Cerro blanco (c. 1835), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chile, http://www.surdoc.cl/registro/2-1465
Measuring the New World, and Chile as a part of it, entailed for a group of German artists to approximate to original inhabitants of those lands from a position that considered them as subjects of study, not merely aesthetic or artistic but also classifiable depending on their physiognomy and under taxonomic norms. These rules came from anthropology, a new academic specialism in natural sciences.
Since the late eighteenth century and throughout the whole nineteenth century, a cluster of German romantic artists disembarked in Chile to scout the territory and to depict its landscapes, nature and people in a wide variety of forms and employing a comprehensive assortment of artistic techniques ranging from sketches and paintings to printed illustrations and photo-engravings. These depictions of strange customs and dances, rough faces, colourful attire, and the semi-naked bodies of the inhabitants that occupied vast territories of those places still not allowed into the “temple of history” due to their permanence in the realm of nature, that is to say America, Africa, and the Pacific islands, were entirely popular in nineteenth-century Germany, becoming the central theme of an essential number of pieces executed by explorers such as Otto Grashof, Theodor Ohlsen, Johann Moritz Rugendas and Carl Alexander Simon. Magazines and albums such as Globus Zeitschrift and Durch Süd-Amerika! reproduced in Germany many of their artworks made in Chile of workers, indigenous people and peasants.
This presentation aims to reveal an alternative interpretation of those artworks, demonstrating the extent to which anthropology and science positively influenced the vision of Chile and Latin America two centuries ago.
