Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2005
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 131-32.
Abstract
The most authoritative study of Swiss artist Karl Bodmer's American prints to have been issued to date, this profusely illustrated volume represents the culmination of several years of exhaustive research by curators and others associated with the Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. A veritable catalogue raisonne of the eighty-one aquatints that comprise the artist's North American atlas (1839- 43), it does for the Bodmer series what previous compilations of this kind have done for the published works of John James Audubon and George Catlin.
The text for Karl Bodmer's North American Prints features lucid essays by Ron Tyler, history professor at the University of Texas and director of the Texas State History Association, and by Brandon Ruud, a former curator with the Durham Center in Omaha and now a researcher at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tyler's "Karl Bodmer and the American West" provides an immediate context for the artist's travels, while "A Faithful and Vivid Picture: Karl Bodmer's North American Prints" by Ruud examines the publishing history of the atlas in considerable detail. Ruud served both as editor of the book and annotator of the plates along with Joslyn curator Marsha V. Gallagher.
The development of each image in the series is accounted for in the 242 pages of the "Catalogue of Tableaux and Vignettes" which occupies roughly two-thirds of the volume. All known issues, states, and variant impressions of the prints are identified and described. The book features fifty-seven pages of appendices, including a "Location Census" listing sixty-four institutional collections of Bodmer material, a catalogue of original Bodmer works relating to the individual prints, and biographies of twenty-nine print-makers who were involved in the production of the atlas in Paris over a period of nearly eight years.
Comments
Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln