This week
readers can return to the Dahesh Museum
of Art Gift Shop, located at 145 Sixth Avenue in New York for another
edition of the Salon Thursdays
series. Salon Thursdays is a free
program where leading arts scholars provide illustrated lectures, and on
November 1st at 6:30 P.M. the Dahesh presents Jean-Frederic Waldeck: A Nineteenth-Century Artist Painting Exotic
Mexico, courtesy of Esther Pasztory,
Professor of Pre-Columbian Art History at Columbia University. She will discuss the life and work of this
quirky Orientalist who went to Mexico and made the ancient Mayans and Aztecs
vivid in an entirely modern way.
Professor Pasztory is the author of Jean-Frédéric
Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico, a fascinating look at this controversial
figure. For further details, call the
Dahesh at 212.759.0606.
The life of
Jean-Frédéric Waldeck (1766-1875) is shrouded in mystery. He gave his birthplace as Paris, and Prague
and Vienna, and alternated between claiming that he was English, Austrian or
German. Depending on circumstances, he
also claimed to be a Baron, a Duke or a Count.
What is
certain is that he went to Mexico when he was 60 years old to copy the newly
discovered Maya ruins of Palenque and other Mesoamerican centers. His representations of Mayan and Aztec art
were the first produced by a European artist, and as such, were seen through a
Neoclassic lens. Waldeck eventually went
native, painting his Mayan mistress and scenes of everyday life.
Because of
the many half-truths and sometimes outright falsehoods he told over his
lifetime (including that he participated in major exploratory expeditions that
have no record of his involvement), Waldeck’s reputation has now been of
interest mainly to scholars and archivists.
Professor Pasztory took some time from her busy schedule to talk about
Waldeck and her upcoming lecture with The Jade Sphinx:
Can you please tell us a little
about your talk at the Dahesh this Thursday?
I’m going
to talk about Waldeck’s life and work; first about the inaccuracies people have
perceived in the work and why they do not value him, and, also about my
discovery that there are inaccuracies in his work because he was mainly more
interested in art than he was in illustration.
I will also provide insight on various paintings he made while he was in
Mexico.
Waldeck tried to approach Mayan and
Aztec art through a European artistic tradition – what were the values or pitfalls
of such an approach?
Let’s put
it this way: Waldeck tried to be everything.
He tried to be an illustrator, he tried to be an artist, and he tried
for anything in his era he could probably be in order to make fame and
fortune. And by being a Neoclassic
artist, he was able to see the naturalistic and beautiful aspects of Mayan art
that his contemporaries would not see.
Waldeck has not been taken seriously
by scholars, and his work, mostly hidden in archives, is unknown to most art
historians. Is it time for a
reassessment?
I
definitely think so. I think he is an
artist like the Orientalists of the 19th Century, but rather than go East, he
went West. And he was interested in the
exotic, and he gave us some fascinating images of the exotic in the Americas.
In my cursory look at Waldeck’s
biography, I see that he sometimes said he was various different European
nationalities. He often claimed royal
titles. How were you able to get your
arms around such an elusive figure?
It was not
that difficult. We don’t know where he
was born, but it’s probable that it was in Prague or Vienna. When he was a child (and we don’t know how
old), he went to Paris, France, where he operated as a French artist. All of his journals are in French, there are
no German or foreign language words in his notes. So though he was not of French birth, he was
French by his upbringing.
He didn’t
go into Mexico until his late middle age.
The great mystery of Waldeck is that we don’t know a great deal about
his early life. He made a lot of grand
statements about the expeditions he was on, but they can’t be proven. The only part of his life that we can prove
is that period in Mexico. He went to
Mexico specifically to paint the Mayan ruins that he came across in a
lithographer’s studio in England. (He
was working in England at the time.)
Please tell us about your book, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic
Mexico.
What I
tried to do was situate Waldeck in his time, and within the aesthetic ideas of
his time. What would his background and
training bring to the Mayan ruins?
Actually, he brought a great many books with him, as he was an
intelligent and learned person. So I was
mainly interested in the context through which he saw these things. I also thought he was an interesting 19th
Century artist – not a major one, but certainly an important minor one.
Do you have other books in the
works?
Yes – Aliens and Fakes, which is about the
crazy theories people have about the origins of Native Americans; things like
extraterrestrials, and Lost Tribes of Israel and trans-Pacific travel. All of these strange theories people come up with
to explain the existence and heritage of an entire people.
I’ve always found that pseudoscience
both fascinating and a little ridiculous.
I think I
don’t want to poke fun at it – that’s all too easy. I want to explain why people believe in these
ideas, why it made sense to them, and why it still does, to some extent. It’s a phenomenon that does not want to go
away.
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