NCAW | Volume 18, Issue 2 | Autumn 2019

Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

by Kristine K. Ronan, with Allan McLeod

Over the winter of 1833–34, the Numak'aki (Mandan) war chief Mató-Tópe (ca. 1784–1837) visited the painting studio kept by Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (1809–93) at Fort Clark, a trading post in what is now North Dakota, fifty-five times. This project argues that this shared studio space and its activities are an extension of the Middle Ground, or the cultural arena co-created by Native and non-Native peoples on the French frontier. The Numak'aki name that local warriors bestowed upon Bodmer (Kapúska, or “Forcefully Makes Marks”) demonstrates this co-creation by describing the artist’s practices through a Numak'aki lens, rather than a Western one—a testimony to the co-operation of two distinct cultural systems within the Fort Clark studio. The project’s digital platform then models this argument in presenting the project’s related archives through both Native and non-Native frameworks.

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.23

Aging and Urban Refuse in Édouard Manet’s The Ragpicker

by Shira Gottlieb

This article situates Édouard Manet’s The Ragpicker (1865–70) within the context of two emerging aspects in nineteenth-century France: consumerism and old age. By reading the painting alongside Baudelaire’s writings on ragpickers, which refer to the same peculiar and uncommon characteristics and to an affinity between aged people and the refuse the pickers collect and recycle, this essay suggests that the painting serves as a social commentary on consumerism and the state of the growing elder population, and also situates the modern artist himself as a sort of ragpicker.

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.2

Chiffonniers in the Periphery: Émile Bernard’s Ragpickers of Clichy and Nineteenth-Century Artificial Cranial Modification

by Claire Heidenreich

This article reexamines Émile Bernard’s painting Ragpickers of Clichy (1887), drawing attention to its relationship with the archaic French custom of artificial cranial modification. Although Bernard is best known as an innovative symbolist who worked alongside Paul Gauguin in 1888–89, this work was transitional, made while the young artist experimented with styles and subjects that were indebted to impressionism, post-impressionism, and neo-impressionism. While Ragpickers of Clichy reveals elements of exaggeration and abstraction that mark his later work, it also owes a debt to the impressionist concern with naturalism because Bernard portrayed a factual anatomical difference as he contrasted industrialization with antiquated tradition.

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.3

Strength and Fragility in Late Figure Drawings by Eugène Delacroix

by Joyce Bernstein Howell

A group of Delacroix’s late drawings of the human figure share a preoccupation with muscular physiques, coupled with poses and gestures antithetical to physical strength. Their production corresponds to the final phase of an ongoing health crisis that plagued the painter from his early forties in the 1840s until his death in 1863. This study argues that the artist’s health crisis and efforts to cope with it provide an appropriate frame of reference for interpreting a new level of meaning for the drawings.

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.4

Music and the Convergence of the Arts in Symbolist Salons: From the Salons de la Rose†Croix to the Salons d’Art Idéaliste

by Lucien Midavaine

During the 1890s, European symbolist artists organized salons that included multiple art forms with the aim of creating an artistic phenomenon. The evolution of exhibition practices at this time coincided with a deep interest in the synthesis of the arts, as well as research regarding the union of sensory perception. This article contextualizes the convergence of the arts in the symbolist movement, in particular the inclusion of music in their exhibitions. Employing a concrete approach, it focuses on two such cases in Paris and Brussels.

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.5

Ludwig Knaus, Peace, ca. 1878, and Gustav Richter, Victory, 1878

by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.2.6