Date of Award
Summer 8-2014
Degree Name
Master of Arts (AM/MA)
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their art, but also published travel accounts and conducted public lectures reporting on the peoples and places they had visited. Hoeffler and Wimar traveled to the American West. Frisch, Bracht and Schreyer were Orientalists. The reception of their work is tied to the imperial aspirations and entrepreneurial possibilities their artistic subjects represented for the American and German public who read their travel writing and bought their art.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Elizabeth Childs
Committee Members
Angela Miller, Lynne Tatlock
Recommended Citation
Griesbach, Sarah Hermes, "Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (mis)Representation by German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890" (2014). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 9.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/9
Included in
Fine Arts Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons
Comments
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7SB43PJ