Contenu du sommaire : Beauté de l'Amérique, de ses identités et de ses territoires

This article examines three factors that motivate the narrative construction of the “New World” chronicles, particularly those dealing with the colonization of Brazil. The first is that in these Brazilian chronicles, motifs referring to the marvelous fauna of the medieval tradition are found. The second factor examined, closely linked to the first, is the finding that the reasons for this wonderful fauna come from the tradition of bestiary books from the Middle Ages. Finally, the third factor is the pragmatics of promotional intention present in these chronicles. Reasoning the relationship between these factors, the article makes a comprehensive critical description of the animals in the colonial chronicles that present motifs from the medieval bestiary. It concludes that this treatment of colonial fauna reveals the intention to promote the natural realities of Brazilian colonial lands, using the relationship between the record of exoticism, gain, and exploration, beyond simple disinterested wonder. Although it is not the intention of the article, given its limits, to make a theory of this relationship, it points to the conclusion that the marvelous exotic fauna of colonial Brazil worked many times as an incentive for the enjoyment between the imaginary and the real of the things of the lands newly discovered.

Various theoretical essays on beauty, the sublime and the picturesque nourished European Romantic landscape aesthetics. Humboldt's "rediscovery" of the New World and his reflections about intertropical nature also inspired the traveling artists who represented the Americas. Such was the case of Frédéric Mialhe, already author of a picturesque album on the Pyrenees, whose lithographed views of Cuba were able to satisfy the aspirations of the Creole elites, eager to symbolically appropriate their territory thanks to new and quality imagery. In the perspective of these cultural transfers, the themes of the island rainforest, the feeling of the mountains and the sea will be evoked with various examples of landscape views.

This paper studies the photographic landscapes of Rio de Janeiro taken by the Swiss Georges Leuzinger during the second half of the 19th century. Leuzinger is regarded as one of the pioneers of views of Rio's landscapes, which were panoramic photographs that enabled the visualization of the city's natural beauties and urban growth. The dissemination of images alluding to a modern nation was favorable to the Brazilian Second Empire, at a time of necessary promotion of political and cultural identity. Georges Leuzinger's photographs were part of Brazilian and Universal exhibitions between 1866 and 1885. Thus, this article analyzes the aesthetic uses of Rio de Janeiro's landscape photography from the 1860s onwards, considering its audience (national and foreign), the subjects portrayed and Leuzinger's pioneering spirit in the commercialization and exhibition of these images.

The West German television series The Black Forest Clinic, broadcast in the 1980s, was a phenomenal success and remains embedded in the German cultural memory to this day. Taking place mainly in the Black Forest, it celebrates the beauty of the landscape and the quality of life in an emphatic way. This harmony is fully maintained during the journey to the United States undertaken by the main character. On the one hand, America's unfailing beauty reflects the strong cultural and geopolitical ties between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, and, on the other hand, the idealised view held by many citizens of both Germanies.

Many 19th-century American landscapes feature mountains, and one can follow the geographical expansion of the United States towards the west as views featuring those naturel elements were produced. Several artists, including from the Hudson River School, left writings which bear witness to their admiration for the beauty of those mountains which they strove to convey in their canvases. The aesthetic concepts of the picturesque and sublime can be found in those artworks, underscoring the beauty of the mountains. An analysis of examples produced throughout the 19th century suggests mountains are part of the natural elements used by painters as symbols of the country's national identity.

In the late nineteenth century, the pioneers carried out several expeditions to explore the American West and gather information on the native territories that were still unexplored at the time. Among them, the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel was led by geologist Clarence King and it included a photographer amongst the scientists involved. Timothy O'Sullivan produced a body of pictures documenting the Wild West, based on the stratigraphy theory which was dear to Clarence King. He emphasized the rugged nature of the rocks and showed landscapes that were reminiscent of Edmund Burke's sublime. This aesthetics influenced the landscape representation in the US throughout the twentieth century and it still does in the Anthropocene Era. By analyzing three stages in the history of photography (the nineteenth-century exploration, the New Topographics exhibition of the mid-1970s and the current post-photography), I will try to show how the concept of the sublime has been deconstructed and reinvented throughout History.

This paper analyzes the contrasting approaches to the beauty of America by filmmaker John Huston (1906-1987). A certain melancholy is common to them: the question of the lost secret, the harsh beauty of wandering, the specter of destruction and war, the curse of discovery and the voyage of exploration, the plunge into the Deep South and the lost soul of the world. In Huston's work, men have drifted away from their origin. Nature is so strong that she remains alone, immobile despite her apparent movement, and the men who "succeed" are those who return to her. This is the myth of the return, the return to the origin, to the secret of the world. The beautiful secret of the world, however, has the implacable beauty of destiny. In 2022, Huston's work, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) to Under the Volcano (1984), through Misfits (1961) and Night of the Iguana (1964), appears to us as an ecological fable before the letter. About fifteen years before the ecological utopias of the 1960s, Huston's work provides a possible poetic framework for the dilemma of our relationship to the world : how do men and raw materials travel, who owns the riches of the soil, who works to extract them, who benefits from them, how to share in times of crisis?

This article aims to study the representation of the beauty of nature in Terrence Malick's movies, as the image of a lost paradise, made impossible by the advance of the civilization. The Texan director's first five movies are dedicated to founding moments of the history of the United States – the arrival of the English colonists, the country's industrialization, and the Second World War – during which the state of culture gradually takes over from the state of nature. From then on, the issue of the movies, which strive to exalt the American territories, is to find out how the human being can still maintain an authentic relationship with the world around him and rise in contact with nature and its beauty.

This article offers a reflection on the humanist and documentary dimension of American society through its landscapes and its social identities. The analysis focuses on the Greogory Crewdson's photographic series, characterized by an interest in the “forme tableau” in the art photography. These skillfully orchestrated frozen stagings, created from scratch in chiaroscuro, between day and night, allow access to a universe beyond the world so close and so distant at the same time; while exploring the relationship between the made and the familiar, as well as the relationship between the topography of the imaginary and that of the American landscape. In these micro-territories of America where loneliness, alienation and melancholy reign, Crewdson creates a dialogue between domestic exterior and interior environments bathed in a “inquiétante étrangeté”, a metaphor for a grotesque vision of the social reality of The American way of life. In an atmosphere of twilight, shadow and light end up becoming the dark metaphor of American myth. Between social reality and narrative fiction, Crewdson's photographic work gives a remote reading of American economic issues and social anxiety.

The thesis developed in this article concerns the autonomy of ugliness in contemporary art. Admittedly not exhaustive, this analysis aims to show, from a few emblematic works by visual artists from North and South America, how what was hitherto on the fringes of any work, will acquire in particular in the last decades of the 20th century of paramount importance. . By upsetting the order of values, by breaking the alliance of ugly, evil and falsehood, ugliness (as subject of the work, process of creation and stimulation of negative affects) will assert itself as a power capable of embody other aspirations. Ugliness will then no longer be limited to representing what should not be but to transcribing the appearance of what is. Disturbing, these productions will make the ugly the vehicle of a certain truth. Denouncing the ignominy specific to certain types of intersubjective relations, these plastic productions featuring an abject humanity will want to be the triggers of a possible change. It is these different facets of ugliness present in an innovative way at the heart of the work of visual artists from North and South America that this article proposes to explore.