Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Mary Zundo ( University of Illinois, Art History, Urbana-Champaign, u sa )
Latitudes of Vision : Humboldt, Western Emigration, and American Art of the
Frontier
Th is paper examines the role of Alexander von Humboldt’s geographic and scientifi c
theories on nineteenth-century American western expansionism, map production,
and pictures of emigration across the western frontier landscape. Th ousands
of emigrants swept westward by mid-century, spurred by western “boosters”
like William Gilpin, who used Humboldt’s theories regarding the latitudes of
great civilizations to promote the westward imperative of American empire.
Correspondingly, a number of nineteenth-century American artists came to view
the picture plane as a cartographic surface upon which to construct their images
of westward travel. A number of painters, who struggled to adapt existing aesthetic
formulae to their pictures of uncharted frontier spaces, were also largely informed
by an era of intense scientifi c exploration, the ideologies of Manifest Destiny—the
“divinely ordained” Euro-American conquest of the continent—and a “Golden Age”
in American cartography that effl oresced in response to the most rapid westward
expansion in United States history. Th is paper argues that such rhetoric, in turn,
fashioned the lens through which these American artists understood—visually and
conceptually—the journey as a linear itinerary from east to west along Humboldt’s
isothermal latitudes surrounding the 40th parallel. Th ese panoramic pictorial
narratives depicted the journey from right-to-left and east-to-west, a compositional
tendency that runs counter to that in European art. From widely disseminated
pictorial works in print to monumental paintings, this paper examines Humboldt’s
infl uence on American art and the culture of westering that informed it.
Email maryzundo@aol.com
Section Alexander von Humboldt
Panel 91
Date July 31
Time 15 :00
Location l 115