Contenu du sommaire : Du Far West au Louvre : le musée indien de George Catlin

George Catlin, “American painter” ? Certainly, but in what sense exactly ? During his life (1796-1872), two mutually exclusive types of Americans inhabited the continent: the native Indians and the colonists of European origin. From his earliest childhood, Catlin found himself caught between the two. Yankee by birth, education and temperament, he was decisively influenced very early on by Indian cultures. The boy refused to be divided. His history and that of his family, bound up with the bloody birth of the American nation, set him the challenge of reconciling opposites. The adult Catlin took up the challenge, making the mad gamble of attempting to reconcile everything in a single creation, his own brainchild and the work of his own hands – his Indian Gallery. Once it was completed, he ruined himself to keep it alive, identified with it to his very last breath. The contents were western ; it was an ark of memories. The Indian Gallery was a recreation of the mythical ark of Genesis, built in order to save its precious contents from that most final of disappearances, forgetfulness: the great vistas of Indian cultures, thousands of Indians captured in paint, as many artefacts, faces and customs that the relentless conquerors of the West were soon to engulf. But the paintings are not the whole man. Independent and headstrong, eager for fame but a poor businessman, Catlin was also hunter, sailor, ethnographer, writer and director of tableaux vivants – with Amerindians in the starring roles, naturally enough.

What if Catlin was above all else a historical painter, as he declared on more than one occasion ? And a painter of European history ? For, around 1800, spectacle became a requisite intrinsic to the practice of art in the Anglo-Saxon world, in very specific though now largely forgotten circumstances: the decomposition of academic structures which had up until then governed the way art was practised and received. Two paths then opened up to practitioners of art: firstly, the production of novel and spectacular types of paintings such as openwork motifs, “tableaux mouvants”, panoramas, and dioramas ; secondly, “show business”, still known as the “museum industry” – the exhibition industry, a somewhat disreputable cultural domain where theatre, special attractions and “museums” reactivated for the entertainment of modern city-dwellers, the bygone “Wunderkammers” of the Renaissance. A phase in European cultural history that we no longer wish to hear anything of.

The presentation of George Catlin's Indian Gallery in Paris, from May to September 1845, then of two of his Indian portraits at the annual Salon in March 1846, did more than simply arouse public curiosity, but had an immediate effect upon the new generation of artists, for whom the museum-show and paintings provided unexpected inspiration for construction of a new aesthetic in which “the other in art”, i.e. all forms of creation a priori excluded from academic consideration, played a major role. The article compares the reactions of Théophile Gautier, George Sand, Gérard de Nerval, Champfleury and Baudelaire, all of whom were highly attentive visitors to the museum. While recognising Catlin's contribution, they disagreed on the meaning of the “savagery” they discovered there: did it spring from the primitive, from the primordial or from the essence of art ?

Between 1839 and 1848, a travelling “museum” comprising ethnographic artefacts and paintings collected or created by the American painter George Catlin, was on show in a number of major European cities. The gallery, brought to life by the presence of several bands of Redskins, was very much in line with the thinking behind colonial domination, and its style of presenting “savage” authenticity was a product of ongoing adaptation. Catlin presented his Indian actors as exotic witnesses to “civilised” manners. Their explicit or unconscious support of the spectacle of the White Man's domination in America affected the ways, theatrical and museal alike, in which the “culture shock” theme was represented. At the same time, “tradition” as exhibited in this mobile and receptive “Indian reserve” was both an age-old cultural wellspring and a modern symbolic and economic resource in which the Indians were investing. The active participation of occupied acculturated individuals in this commercial enterprise explains their need to be viewed as characters out of folklore.

In 1845, the presentation of George Catlin's travelling museum and the accompanying show put on by the Iowa Indians were immediately depicted in “L'Illustration” magazine and, not long after, in Épinal prints. In a century where pictorial images were becoming available to all, these two mediums led to a complete turnaround in the way that the French public pictured Amerindians. The process had already begun in 1827 with the visit of the Osage Indians, and consisted in a deep-seated change in the way that visual stereotypes came to be formed. An image laying claims to realism, incorporating actually observed characteristics, began to coexist with then replace for the classic allegorical image of the “American savage”. Presented as eyewitness evidence, Catlin's depiction of the Indian in fact resulted from a reconstruction of characteristics, motifs and situations, and gave rise to a representation easily assimilated by the public, and which still has wide currency today.