At least that’s the point made by a fascinating new exhibit at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle. “I like America–Fictions of the Wild West” (until Jan. 7, 2007) looks at the West in painting, print and sculpture from 1825 to 1950. From the 19th-century portraits of Indian chiefs by American artists who never made it west of the Mississippi, to the 20th-century German expressionists who chose Native Americans they’d never encountered to populate a happy Arcadia, what we see is never what it seems.
As the show points out, America’s own view of the West was greatly influenced by the transatlantic connection. Many of America’s most important 19th-century artists were German immigrants, or trained at the then-famous Düsseldorf school of landscape painting. In what’s probably the grandest frontier painting of them all, Alfred Bierstadt’s “Emigrants Crossing the Plains” (1867), the Rockies look more like the Alps–and the magnificently detailed oaks look less at home in American Indian country than on the banks of the Rhine.
In Emanuel Leutze’s “Last Mohican” (1850), the noble Indian is lost in dreamy, inward thought, removed from the world’s troubles on a rock high above the horizon–an archetype of German romanticism. That Leutze painted his Indian in Düsseldorf makes no difference. (He likewise used the Rhine and some American art students as stand-ins for his most famous painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”) Like most 19th-century Europeans, Leutze didn’t care much about real Indians, imagining them instead as a countermetaphor for his era’s relentless advance of technology and modernization. For Europeans, the Native American was, if you will, an early antiglobalization icon.
One corner of the exhibit shows off the books of Karl May, an immensely popular German author. His fantastical Indian novels–he wrote some while imprisoned for fraud and only made it to America long after his career ended–shaped generations of Europeans’ views of the West. In May’s work, there is a stark division between “good natives” who live off the land, and the money-grubbing traders and settlers whose selfish strivings unsettle the “natural” order. This darker side of what the Romantics saw in America gives the Schirn exhibit a powerful connection to the present-day. Europeans’ early images of the West reflect many of the romantic longings for a simpler, preglobalization past that have once again become a powerful current of culture. And not just in Europe.
