September – October, 1 p.m. ET
Frederic Edwin Church, Study for "The Heart of the Andes," 1858, oil on canvas, Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, OL.1981.47.A.B.
Join us for this six-part online lecture series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Presentations by historians of art and science and contemporary artists address how Humboldt’s observations and ideas from 200 years ago resonate with even greater relevance today in the face of climate change. This series of talks replaces the symposium scheduled for March 20, 2020, which was cancelled due to the global pandemic.
Eleanor Jones Harvey
Senior curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum
September 16, Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
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On Wednesday, September 16, 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a lively lecture with Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at SAAM and curator of the landmark exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture. This is the first lecture in a six-part series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist, and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Learn how Humboldt’s ideas shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment in this thought-provoking lecture.
The exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about the lasting influence of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) with artworks that reveal how the American wilderness became emblematic of the country’s distinctive character. The exhibition includes the original Peale Mastodon skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, as well as two paintings by Charles Willson Peale featuring the fossil—Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806–08) and "The Artist in His Museum" (1822). Featuring this important fossil, that has been in Europe since 1847, emphasizes how natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in 1801 in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Its discovery became a symbol of civic pride. In 1804, Humboldt was honored with a dinner beneath the mastodon exhibited in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia.
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) All right. Thank you, Stephanie. I appreciate that. It is a pleasure to have all of you here and to be able to talk with you today about a project that has consumed me for the better part of the last six years. I first began working on Humboldt when I was a geology major. I ran into him in my Historical Geology class, and when I switched majors to art history bumped into him chatting up Frederic Church, the landscape painter in the corner. And although the connections between Church whose painting of [The] Natural Bridge you see on the screen now and Humboldt are fairly well known, what wasn't really as well known were the other connections. When I was working on The Civil War I discovered that Humboldt was an ardent abolitionist and had supported John C. Fremont’s 1856 presidential campaign, and I began wondering why Humboldt ended up lurking in almost every project I have ever worked on and what would happen if we made him the focal point instead, and so I began working on that. I found out that he had come to the United States briefly specifically to meet the third president, Thomas Jefferson, and at that point I knew I needed to go wherever the leads led me. So what I want to do first is to talk to you a little bit about who is Humboldt. He was a Prussian naturalist in what is now Germany, one of the most widely admired and well recognized people alive during his generation. He lived to be almost 90. He wrote 36 books, over 20,000 letters, slept about four hours a night, called coffee concentrated sunbeams, and traveled over 40,000 miles on four continents at a time when most people never left their hometowns. There are features named on the planet for him, over 300 animal species and plant species. There is a mare on the moon named for Humboldt and two asteroids, more than for any other human being who has ever lived. He believed in international scientific cooperation and developed the concept of nature that we take for granted today, that there is an underlying unity of nature and that nothing exists that is not connected to everything else. Fortunately, as Stephanie mentioned, we have this wonderful biography by Andrea Wulf focusing on how Humboldt developed his concept of nature. If you haven't had a chance to read it, I heartily recommend it to you. For Humboldt himself, it was his book Cosmos, a sketch of a physical description of the universe, that appeared first in 1845, became an instant bestseller, was translated into over 20 languages, and it's the one that made him an international celebrity. But for our purposes, we're going to start a little bit earlier than that. In 1804, after spending five years traveling across South America and Mexico amassing the data that would be the foundation for his life's work, Humboldt took a detour, and he spent all of six weeks in the United States. During this time he invented nothing, discovered nothing, and did not go exploring, and in most accounts of Humboldt's life this trip is treated a little bit like an airport layover, but the truth is, those six weeks shaped the way we think about nature and science and our place in the world. Humboldt's enthusiasm for America charmed his hosts and established friendships that lasted half a century. His first contact is with the man you see here, the artist Charles Willson Peale, who greeted Humboldt on the docks of Philadelphia, took him around the city, introduced him to members of the American Philosophical Society, America's leading scientific society, and then took him to the place that Peale is welcoming us into, his museum. Peale’s museum is a compendium of art, natural history, and it's constructed as a civics lesson, so if you look really closely at the portraits at the upper part of the cases, there's George Washington, and he's placed not accidentally over the glass-fronted case that contains stuffed bald eagles. Little bit of national symbolism there. Poor Ben Franklin's turkey is waiting to be taxidermied on the floor. It's a place in which Peale assumed Americans would learn about their country, to take pride in its natural features, in its eminent statesmen, and to work with their hands and really understand how the world worked, and it will be Peale who will escort Humboldt to Washington, D.C. to fulfill the object of Humboldt's visit to meet President Thomas Jefferson. So in preparation for that, Humboldt writes Jefferson a letter. There's an excerpt of it here. He outlines his reason for the visit. He admires American democracy, particularly in the face of monarchical Europe. He's read Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia making the case for why America matters, and they both share a fascination with the mammoth which was then considered the largest terrestrial creature ever known. So what is it about mammoths? As I said, it's found in America, not Europe. It is bigger than any other creature that had been found. We're about 30 years away from finding dinosaurs yet, so for time being it's the mammoth. Humboldt considered mammoth's natural monuments which will become important for us because he flags something about America that plays to our insecurity at the time. Europe has the Seven Wonders of the World, all architectural, all man-made. What Humboldt is saying is you can't build your way to the top, but what you have is science. What you have is nature. You have natural monuments. You have places like Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls. You've got the mammoth. This is what you build your imprimatur on, and, oh, by the way, I can use your data in my writings, so feed it here. So in terms of playing to your strengths, what he also knew was 1802 for the United States turned out to be the Year of the Mammoth. In 1801, Peale had found the bones and excavated the better part of a complete skeleton in Upstate New York and placed it on view in his museum, and then in 1802 you can see the inhabitants of Cheshire, Massachusetts make a mammoth cheese that they put on a flatbed cart and take down to Washington, D.C. to present to Thomas Jefferson who was known somewhat affectionately as the “Mammoth in Chief.” Along the way there was a nine-pound beet that was pickled that was to go along with the cheese. A baker in Washington baked a loaf of bread the size of a human casket to go along with it. There were mammoth egg hunting and egg eating contests, and I want to give a shout-out to my colleague, Nancy Siegel, who happily provided me with a plethora of mammoth-related foodstuffs that went along with the celebratory atmosphere. So Peale's mammoth, which you see here in our galleries, was also a fixture in his museum. It was the thing people flocked to see. It was the calling card that allowed them to take pride in the scale and scope of America's cultural ambitions writ large in this 11-foot-tall skeleton. And there, in fact, you can see connecting with the arrow the mastodon as it is installed in our galleries, and you can see it peeking out from behind the curtain in Peale’s museum. It's an amazing feat on a number of different levels, not the least of which is nobody really knew what a mastodon looked like. This is the first time we put it together, and Peale made an astute guess and realized that the closest approximation was going to be an elephant, and so he made a copy of an elephant skeleton from a French engraving and used it as what I like to think of as the Ikea instruction manual for how you put together a mastodon. This bone must go here, the ribs go there, and gradually he pieced the whole thing together. The parts that he was missing he had Philadelphia sculptor William Rush supply, and with the help of his son, Rembrandt, and also a free black man, Moses Williams, who worked for him, together they put together the armature that would allow them to display the mastodon as a freestanding subject in one of the rooms of Peale’s museum. Peale obviously is very proud of this. He shows it off to Humboldt. Humboldt actually knew that it was there, and when they get to Washington, what will also happen is that Humboldt's other reason for coming becomes readily apparent. He is aware of the recent Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and you can see that in the middle of this circa 1800 map a whole stretch marked “Louisiana” and “Texas” and then the western Spanish possessions. The Louisiana Purchase is the part marked “Louisiana.” Well, Jefferson had caught wind of Humboldt's travels through the American Consul in Cuba who set up the transit arrangements, and so he knew that one of the things Humboldt was carrying with him was a detailed map of the Texas-to-California region of what would become the United States, that part of the Kingdom of New Spain, and it filled in a lot of questions that Jefferson had about exactly what they had just acquired with Louisiana, but more importantly about the argument that Jefferson was having with the King of Spain over where the location of the border should be between these two countries. And so I want to pop a detail here and point out that in the upper red circle you can see Santa Fe, New Mexico, what would become Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the middle down below the location of one of the settlements of the Comanche Indians, but the thing that Jefferson was most interested in in his questions for Humboldt, who lives there, and are their mines? Are there churches? Is it arable land? The other thing he's really concerned about is Spain wants the border where the blue arrow is, on the Sabine River that now separates Louisiana from Texas. Jefferson, at Humboldt's urging, was arguing for the Rio Grande which is the current border between Texas and Mexico demarcated by the red arrow, so this turns out to be an incredibly important piece of geopolitical intelligence that Humboldt has simply laid out for us to copy. In fact, this map, our copy of Humboldt's map, is now in the Library of Congress' map room and is, of course, in this exhibition. So Jefferson is thrilled. Humboldt has come bearing a gift, the likes of which he could not have even imagined, and Humboldt in return is asking for the same kinds of statistics to be sent to him, and what he will do is work us into his natural history narratives so that we are part of Humboldt's larger story about how nature works. So before Humboldt leaves he has written to James Madison, “This country that stretches to the west of these mountains presents a vast area to conquer for science.” Humboldt missed meeting Lewis and Clark by only a matter of weeks in 1804. He actually toyed with the idea of taking off after them wondering whether or not their equipment was good enough to bring back the caliber of measurements he had been making across South America, but was ultimately dissuaded and declared instead that he would come back at a time when he could actually retrace their steps and go and see what was, in fact, west of those mountains. By the time Humboldt leaves he has charmed pretty much everyone in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Peale has come out of retirement and painted the portrait of Humboldt that you see at the top here and installed it in the same run of portraits that includes George Washington and other American luminaries. So Humboldt, the mastodon, and Peale all becomes part of the same enterprise, and by adding Humboldt to this canon of the people who helped found our country, it's as though he is claiming Humboldt, himself, as an American. And in fact, before Humboldt leaves Dolley Madison says, “He is the most…interesting traveler we have ever met, and is much pleased with America.” She really hopes that Humboldt can be convinced either to stay or to come back and live out his life in the United States as an American. The life-long friendship that Humboldt forges with Thomas Jefferson reflected in Jefferson's comment calling Baron von Humboldt “an ornament of our age” was reciprocated by Humboldt, and the two of them maintained a correspondence until Jefferson's death in 1826. But it's not all about geopolitics. These friendships also fostered the idea that there's an enthusiasm for the American experiment, that Humboldt is rooting for us to win. When he lets us borrow his map, he knows he's going to publish it. He's going to give a copy to the King of Spain. He just believes knowledge is to be shared openly, and why wouldn't he want to give the Democratic Republic of the United States a level playing field on which to enter the international geopolitical stage? But in his writings he is also equally committed to the idea that nature and art are united in his work, and in notes on the state of Virginia Jefferson pointed out Natural Bridge in his home state of Virginia and Niagara Falls in the state of New York as being two of America's greatest attributes, scenes of wonder that would epitomize that sense of feeling as though this is an amazing country with brand new things to offer. Humboldt will write about both of these features in his books. He will compare them to equivalent features in South America. He will extol Jefferson's wise guidance of the United States. And so by the 1820s we will make the pivot away from using a mammoth, in this case a mastodon and an extinct creature at that, as kind of an avatar for our culture and pivot instead to using natural monuments, starting with the ones articulated by Jefferson and amplified by Humboldt. By the 1850s when a lot of American artists are reading Humboldt's Cosmos, the landscape painters will find that fully one-third of the second volume of Cosmos is devoted to advice geared strictly for them. There's encouragement from Humboldt who wrote, “A distinction must be made in landscape painting, as in every other branch of art, between the elements generated by the more limited field of contemplation and direct observation and those which spring from the boundless depth and feeling and the force of idealizing mental power.” In other words, landscape is what you see and the effect that it has on you. And he says, and Frederic Church absorbs this, and these are his two paintings that you see here, both of which are in the exhibition, that, “An artist needs to know enough science to know what he's drawing, and a scientist needs to maintain a sense of aesthetic wonder in order to appreciate nature.” This strikes a chord in the United States because landscape painting is quickly becoming the genre that defines our cultural aspirations, and Frederic Church, whoops, Frederic Church, who made Humboldt's ideas central to his art, paints those two features and helps popularize them. By the 1820s, the use of these two features is so ubiquitous that in Henry Tanner's map of the United States he makes them the focal point of the cartouche. Now, this is the earliest map to show the Oregon Territory as a part of the United States. It builds on Humboldt's map and incorporates all of those features, but I want to draw your attention to the cartouche in the lower corner because here, and I've blown it up, if you look closely, it's got Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls, but they're smooshed together as the Niagara River is actually running underneath Natural Bridge, and effectively what Tanner did was telescoped 800 miles of American topography to bring these two features into the same frame. Now, cartouches and maps often are clues to what the mapmaker, and by extension the country, believes are important. Next time you look at a map take a close look at the cartouche. Most of the maps of Europe have cartouches that either are cityscapes or individual architectural monuments that they, the country of origin, is proud in. We are using nature and natural features in order to accomplish the very same thing. So Frederic Church is the artist in America who is probably most deeply swayed by Humboldt's thinking, and his Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls are both classically Humboldtian pictures merging a scientist's eye for detail and an artist's sense of wonder all in the same canvases, but Humboldt's book, particularly In Views of the Cordilleras, the frontispiece of which you see here, inspired Church to make two trips to South America. He goes the first time with his friend and patron, Cyrus Field, and at night they will be reading Humboldt's words, during the daytime they will retrace his steps. It is very much a fanboy kind of thing going through the Andes in South America. The hacienda that you see below the frontispiece probably is the one that belonged to Carlos Montufar’s family. He was one of Humboldt's friends in Ecuador and a later traveling companion, and Humboldt himself when he stays there will see a portrait of Humboldt that was painted in 1802 when the great explorer was there. He will have this copy made by an Ecuadorian artist, Rafael Salas. He will take it back first to his New York studio and then to Olana where it will stay until it is gifted to William Osborn, one of Church's close friends and patrons who was a founding member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. All of Church's works owe a debt to Humboldt, to that acuteness of vision, regardless of where geographically Church happens to be painting, but the Heart of the Andes, the painting that you see here that he completed in 1858, is kind of a sima of Humboldt's credo of the world as “One great whole, animated by the breath of life.” He meant this as an homage to everything that he had learned from Humboldt, and, in fact, he was making plans to ship the painting to Berlin for Humboldt to see when word came of the great explorer's death in May of 1859. Church felt like he had lost a friend even though the two of them had never met. The New York Times mourned on his behalf, and people flocked to see this painting in order to channel that friendship and to understand the depth to which Humboldt had influenced American art. Now, Church had keyed part of this painting compositionally and from what he included in it based on Humboldt's very first published tableau with geography of plants. Very simply put, what Humboldt realized was if he recorded plant life at specific altitudes in the Alps, in the Andes, maybe in the Rockies and other places, he was finding similar plants at similar altitudes and in similar belts of climate. No one had thought to connect the dots on the world this way, and so what you see in the plant geography map is half watercolor and half Latin names of plants at the altitude at which he found them. The sidebar columns, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, the depth of blue in the sky, corollary information from other places around the globe, this is his first infographic that tries to make sense out of the whole world. And what Church will do is incorporate over 100 identifiable plant species pulled from this map. He will take you from the Amazon River basin to the top of Chimborazo. It is as though this painting is constructed as a visualization of this particular map. Humboldt's influence in this way inflects all of American exploration following Lewis and Clark, and in this case you've got the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Titian Ramsay Peale, Charles Willson's youngest son, who grew up on stories of Humboldt's visit. TR was only about eight at the time. I'm guessing he wasn't paying a whole lot of attention, but every future expedition is going to do two things. They're going to take an artist or a photographer along with them, and most of them are going to end up taking Humboldt's published volumes as part of their research library. And on the ship that Long created to get them to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, they carried an entire shelf that represented all of Humboldt's published works. And then there's John C. Fremont who is known as the “American Humboldt” who takes four trips into the American West to help find the passage for railway lines, who will plant flags, and he will name every feature he can after Humboldt. The reason that the Western United States is peppered with Humboldt’s name can be laid at the feet of John C. Fremont, the Humboldt River Valley, The Humboldt Basin, the Humboldt Mountains, Humboldt County, California, and by proxy everything else named for Humboldt, and, yes, by extension, Humboldt Fog cheese. So there is a sense that what we have here is the kind of welling up of interest in Humboldt and in the way that he then takes our information and folds it into his books and makes us significant in his own orbit. This will extend too beyond Fremont to the three Great Western Surveys in the American West, Ferdinand Hayden in Yellowstone, Clarence King and the 40th Parallel Survey, and John Wesley Powell rafting down the Grand Canyon. All of them are Humboldtians. All of them have surveys that are associated with the Smithsonian. All of them convey the kind of sense that we need to knit the world together, trade information, and build on what we already know. The logical extension of this will come in 1903 when Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, both of whom are Humboldt devotees, meet to discuss in 1903 how to preserve Yosemite. They go on an epic camping trip. You can see them here with the falls behind them. Muir had been influenced by Humboldt for decades, but the two of them both believed that educating people to think broadly and deeply and using nature as a way of focusing that knowledge was really important and something that America needed to codify, and so the roots of the National Park System, the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Prairie Reserve are all lodged in Humboldtian thinking about downstream consequences, about planetary stewardship, and about taking care of nature as a restorative place for us as well. The outstanding book on Humboldt’s environmental legacy is Aaron Sach's The Humboldt Current, another book that I would heartily recommend that you take a read for if you've got the time for it because it's a fabulous journey, and it will put American environmental thinking into solid perspective. Humboldt was also deeply influential in American literature. The man you see here is James Fenimore Cooper, and the painting behind him is Thomas Cole's Last of the Mohicans. Fenimore Cooper wrote the bulk of the Leatherstocking [Tales] stories after reading the Long Expedition report while he was visiting Paris and hanging around with Humboldt, and, in fact, it is Cooper and Washington Irving who will spend three years with Humboldt in Paris. It will encourage Irving when he comes back home to take his only trip West that will start with a tour of the prairies and culminate with the Bonneville Stories. They're hanging around with sculptor Horatio Greenough and painter Samuel F.B. Morse in a kind of pro-American Parisian colony in which they are all hanging out together, and, in fact, it's Fenimore Cooper's daughter, Susan [Fenimore Cooper], who will write Rural Hours, one of the earliest environmental books written by a woman author with an introduction by her father, one of the eminent naturalist’s books published at the time. It probably won't surprise you that Humboldt's influence extends to [Ralph Waldo] Emerson on the left and [Henry David] Thoreau on the right or that Emerson's essay “Nature” of the concept of the transparent eyeball are influenced by Humboldt's precept of the unity of nature. Emerson summed up the breadth and range of Humboldt's interests, not to mention his galvanizing personality, when after reading the first volume of Cosmos he gushed, “The wonderful Humboldt, with his extended center, expanded wings, marches like an army gathering all things as he goes. How he reaches from science to science, from law to law, tucking away moons and asteroids and solar systems in the clauses and parentheses of his encyclopedic paragraphs.” Thoreau went the other direction turning Humboldt's telescope into a microscope looking at the world in miniature and training it on Walden Pond, and if you read Walden, that amassing of statistics and close observation is like Cosmos in miniature, a very personal way of thinking about the world around you being encompassed, and as Humboldt liked to say, being able to see the universe in a single leaf. Walt Whitman will go the other direction and declare himself a kosmos, and, in fact, was reported to have written Leaves of Grass with a copy of Humboldt’s Cosmos on his desk. Certainly the poem “Kosmos” doesn't appear in editions of Leaves of Grass until after Whitman had encountered Humboldt's work. It's a distinction about an American literary thread that comes through the Knickerbocker writers to the conquered transcendentalists. There is that arc that follows landscape painting that really talks about place being incredibly important to what it means to be an American and how you think about yourself literally, culturally, personally, and nationally. The great book on this subtopic is Laura Dassow Walls’ The Passage to Cosmos: [Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America]. She does a magnificent job of leading all of this into a discussion of Humboldt and early American history. She has also written separate books on Emerson and Thoreau and their interest in American science. Those are also books that were critical to my understanding of Humboldt’s impact here in the United States. By the 1820s, Humboldt is saturating American K through 12 education. This is the frontispiece of Almira Lincoln's [Phelps] lectures on botany, and I think you will now recognize the plant geography map now translated into English placed as the frontispiece, and it's her signaling that this is going to be the guiding star for the way she is teaching botany and climate in the United States. Almira Lincoln Phelps was Emma Willard's younger sister. She was an eminent author on botany. This is a book that first published in 1829. You see the 1867 edition. We think that there were over 300,000 copies of this book printed and distributed. I picked up a copy on eBay a couple of years ago that was clearly handed down by three different women, schoolgirls in New England, who wrote their own notes, pressed plants between its pages, underlined passages, and Humboldt appears as a guiding star throughout the whole thing. Her older sister, Emma Willard, leaned hard on Humboldt's isothermal lines. “Isotherms” are a term that Humboldt invented. They are gradients of mean temperature measured in 10-degree intervals, and in this case if you look on the left-hand side you can see we're going from Labrador to Boston to Philadelphia to Havana, Cuba. We cross the Atlantic Ocean to Stockholm, Budapest, Naples, and Africa, and then move all the way over to China in the East, and what Humboldt was trying to do was to understand how air and temperature move around the globe to influence our weather. It is quite literally why we have The Weather Channel. Emma Willard picked up on this, and in her Isothermal Chart drawn from the accounts of Humboldt and others, she and her collaborator, Mr. [William C.] Woodbridge, created an American geography that was, again, grounded in Humboldt's plant geography map. If you look closely at this map you will notice the color-coded bands of temperature, but in the middle there are all of these boxes. It's like a genealogical tree, and in there are the characteristic plants drawn from that plant geography map and where they are located in the different regions. This is the way we are beginning to understand climate science in the middle of the 19th century. Lorin Blodget, who is a climate scientist for the Smithsonian Institution, will take it one step further. This is his map of the annual rainfall in the United States. Humboldt was so thrilled when he received a copy of it that he sent Blodget this souvenir photograph of himself and a congratulatory letter which Lorin Blodget cherished. Those are also in this exhibition. In 1829, Humboldt had traveled 1500 miles across Russia at the behest of the Czar to determine if there were mineral assets in the Ural Mountains, diamonds, platinum, gold, that could be extracted. Humboldt told him, “I can tell you that, but it's going to cost you. I want weather stations every 150 miles across Siberia feeding me weekly information about temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and seismic activity.” By 1837, those readings became part of what became known as The Magnetic Crusade which was an effort to take compass readings and magnetic readings around the globe to understand how Earth's magnetism worked. Alexander Dallas Bache, head of the Coast Guard, set up a station at Girard College in Pennsylvania, and by 1837 Humboldt had stations around the globe with the exception of the middle of the oceans feeding him data on climate and magnetism which would inform his and other scientists’ work. Humboldt himself is a bit of a magnet, and, in fact, when he leaves the United States in 1804, Thomas Jefferson sends him back to Europe with a letter of introduction to one of his best friends, the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette writes back to Humboldt after about two years saying, “Oh my God, we are such good friends. Thank you so much for the introduction. This is awesome,” and by that time another man who was in their orbit in Paris was Simon Bolivar, the man who is considered “The Liberator in South America” who believes he was inspired by Humboldt to go back home and liberate his home country of Venezuela along with other South American countries, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, from Spanish Colonial rule. The three of them, Humboldt, Lafayette, and Bolivar, became the three leading revolutionaries in Paris united by their admiration of Jefferson and American democracy and by their disgust over the increasingly imperial tendencies of Napoleon, and, in fact, all three of them will skip Napoleon's self-coronation, he will get angry, he will refer to them as spies, he will try to kick them out of the country, but the camaraderie is one of the things that makes Humboldt such a magnet for every American traveler headed to Europe. In 1814, Humboldt will be part of the Prussian delegation to the Treaty of Ghent which officially ends the War of 1812, and Humboldt is there to advocate on behalf of favorable terms for the United States. It is then he meets the American delegation, his old friend Albert Gallatin from his days with Jefferson, along with John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. Adams will make a side trip to Paris, and the two of them will sit together in the French scientific lectures listening to all of the talks as part of the French scientific community. It's at this time that Humboldt also develops a close friendship with the American artist and inventor, Samuel F.B. Morse, who is in Paris painting the studies for this monumental painting called the Gallery of the Louvre, and, oh, by the way, that's Susan Fenimore Cooper in the foreground taking art lessons because, again, this is all very much a matter of mutual friendships. Humboldt ends up climbing on the scaffolding and distracting Morse. Fenimore Cooper writes about it in his diary that he will look at Morse and say, “You look tired. Let's go walk the galleries,” and then say, “Tell me about the telegraph,” because what Humboldt is more interested in is the idea of instantaneous communication without the interference of monarchs, the censorship of the mail, ships going down at sea, not hearing from someone for over a year, and wondering if your letter ever got through, and so when it's time for Morse to debut the telegraph he will take it to Paris where Humboldt and his best friend, Francois Arago, will help introduce it to the French scientific community, and it is Humboldt who will declare to Morse, “whose philosophic and useful labors have rendered his name illustrious in two worlds,” the worlds of art and the worlds of science. You'll notice in the lower corner there's Morse on one side and Cyrus Field on the other. Remember him? He was Frederic Church's patron. Well, the two of them will go into business to create the transatlantic cable after Arago here on the left and Morse also end up together because it's Arago who will introduce Morse to his best friend, [Louis] Daguerre, the photographer helping to inspire and amplify Morse's interest in photography as part of his career. When Morse and Field go into business to create the transatlantic cable, it is an endeavor that is fraught with difficulty trying to lay a cable across the base of the Atlantic Ocean. Matthew Fontaine Maury known as the “Pathfinder of the Seas” will create the plateau, the route map where it will go. Humboldt is cheering him on from the side, and Cyrus Field being the funder behind all of this plays an adjunct role really in the story behind the Aurora Borealis, the painting that you see here by Frederic Church, which spans from Newfoundland on the east to Ireland further east, the actual arc of the transatlantic cable, and it's been noted by Lauren Applebaum, one of my colleagues, that the electromagnetics in the sky seems to resemble the snapped pieces of the cable as Field tries to lay it from one side of the Atlantic to the other. So from literal electromagnetic impulses to the cable there is this notion that Cosmos is also about networking everything together, something that Humboldt obviously felt very deeply connected to. But it's here also that we pivot to Humboldt’s humanitarian concerns. I mentioned at the beginning that Humboldt was an ardent abolitionist, as he wrote, “All races are, in like degree, designed for freedom.” He wrote that he really felt that the law that allowed people to be enslaved needed to be repealed, that the flaw in American democracy was the inability to abolish slavery, and to William Thornton, one of Jefferson's best friends, he wrote, “This abominable law that permits the importation of negroes to South Carolina is a disgrace for a state in which I know many level-heaved people to live conforming to the only course of action dictated by humanity. Undoubtedly less cotton will be exported at first, but, alas, how I detest the politics that measures and evaluates the public welfare simply according to the value of its exports. The wealth of nations is like the wealth of individuals. It is only secondary to our happiness. Before one is free, one must be just, and without justice, there is no lasting prosperity.” He wrote a letter decrying Daniel Webster's Fugitive Slave Law which was printed on a card by a New York businessman and distributed to Union soldiers in 1864. The copy you see here was sent to Abraham Lincoln along with a note from the businessman saying, “I know you're familiar with Humboldt's words. They must bring you comfort at a time like this.” Frederick Douglass was also deeply involved with Humboldt’s writings and published columns on Humboldt in his paper, The North Star. In 1804 when he came to the United States, Humboldt had written to James Madison, “After having witnessed the great spectacle of the majestic Andes and the grandeur of the physical world, I intended to enjoy the spectacle of a free people worthy of a great destiny.” It's a not-so-subtle dig about that issue of freedom, and, in fact, while he is visiting the United States, Humboldt goes to Mount Vernon which you see here in a painting by Eastman Johnson which focuses not on the magnificent view from the portico across the Potomac River, but on the slave quarters that are attached to the main house, the engine of the entire enterprise in which, and here is a detail, every person depicted is black. Humboldt is interested in talk about George Washington who had died five years earlier, but he really wanted to meet William Lee and any other former enslaved person who had been alive while Washington was alive. He wanted to understand that part of the American experience. In light of the ideals expressed by the Declaration of Independence he wanted to understand how we could square that circle, and in 1825 Humboldt will write to a good friend of his that he fears that if the United States cannot address this lingering evil it will tear the country apart. As a result, it should come as no surprise that Humboldt will support John C. Fremont’s 1856 presidential campaign as the first Republican candidate separate from the Whig Party. You see here an ambrotype with one of his slogans, “Fremont and Freedom!” When he loses to James Buchanan Humboldt is devastated and worries that all of the years that he has spent nattering at Americans about the need to abolish slavery will continue to fall on deaf ears, but Humboldt’s humanitarianism is not just about slavery. He also hates colonialism and oppression. Referring to the calendar stone that you see here that he studied in Mexico City Humboldt observed, “A people whose festivals are arranged according to the stars and whose calendar is engraved on a public monument probably had a higher level of civilization than is granted by those clever historians who have taken America as their subject. These sharp distinctions between barbaric and civilized nations are unacceptable.” He encouraged his protege, Prince Maximilian zu Wied[-Neuwied], to hire the artist Karl Bodmer and travel to the United States, partly to go ahead and retrace the steps of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, check the measurements, collect the natural history, and meet with and talk to the American Indians that he encountered along the way, but it was also an effort to create an ethnographic treatise on North American Indians to rival the work Max had done in the Portuguese colony of Brazil with the Botocudo earlier in his life. The two of them will end up spending a tremendous amount of time with the Mandan Indians up along the Missouri River. There will be vocabularies, there will be listings of rituals. The two of them became very close friends with Mato-Tope of the Mandan and the man you see here, Pehriska-Ruhpa of the Arikara, and in the year that they spent with them wrote out histories and observations that to this day form some of the most important information that we have on these nations. They were traveling along the same route that George Catlin had traveled the year before. Catlin had spent six years creating portraits of American Indians in response to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. In the 1840s, he brought his paintings a tremendous number of Indian artifacts to Europe, first to England, and then to Paris. In Paris he brought with him a troop of Iowa Indians that he had met in the 1830s in their villages. They were in London. They were willing to travel to Paris with him. They performed their native ceremonies, one performance for King Louis Philippe at the Tuileries Gardens, and then in a salon that had been set aside for them in the Gallery of the Louvre. It is there that they met Alexander von Humboldt, and Humboldt using the translator that they had with them, ended up meeting for the first and only time in his life the North American Indians to balance out the experiences that he had had with the indigenous peoples in South America and Mexico during his five years earlier in his life. Their shared revulsion for Jackson's Indian Removal Act is something that was caught up in Theodore Parker's observations. He was a Massachusetts abolitionist who noted, “Humboldt always takes the side of the Indian in North or South America over his oppressor.” By the 1840s, Humboldt is one of the most widely admired people alive. He attracts intersecting networks of colleagues and admirers from a broad variety of fields including the man you see here, British Chemist James Smithson. They first met in 1790 before Humboldt had even come to the United States at the Royal Society in London, and then their paths cross again in 1814 when Smithson spends almost a year in Paris, and after a number of boozy dinners with the Societe d’Arcueil in the [unintelligible], Humboldt and Smithson and Francois Arago become very close friends. And in fact, it is Arago who will stage an intervention when he becomes alarmed about James Smithson's gambling habits. James Smithson's major gamble would be to change his will and to declare that if he died without heirs, legitimate or illegitimate, that his entire fortune would be given to the City of Washington to found an institution bearing his name for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, an institution that Humboldt would come to call “the admirable Smithsonian.” This venture will create an institution that is effectively devoted to expanding on all of Humboldt’s key ideas, and as a result, I'm increasingly aware of Humboldt’s fingerprints on nearly every aspect of American culture, and by extension, on every facet of the Smithsonian. From arts to sciences to cultural museums to outreach, we span the globe. We try to knit it all together. The deeper I dig, the more I'm convinced that this institution is in some ways the concrete manifestation of Humboldt’s brain, echoes of his ideas, his theories, his observations, and his discoveries that are as relevant now as they were two centuries ago. Humboldt’s Cosmos merges rational, empirical science with aesthetic appreciation, or, to put it in Humboldt’s words, “The stars, as they sparkle in the firmament, fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbits marked out with mathematical precision.” I believe we are living in a moment when Humboldt’s ideas are once again tied to the major concerns that we face with regard to human rights, cultural literacy, and as stewards of this planet, and I hope that you'll find ways to embark with us on this journey, either in person or in our programs online. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “Humboldt was like one of those Wonders of the World who appeared from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of our faculties. He was a universal man.” Every bit as relevant now as then, maybe even more so. I'd like to thank you for being a part of this lecture and webinar, and I would be happy at this point to address some of the questions you might have.
- (Gloria Kenyon) Thank you so much, Eleanor. That was absolutely fantastic and riveting, and as one of our viewers said, “Wow, so many dots of our experience connected in one lecture,” so thank you so much for that. We already have some questions about Humboldt and about your lecture, and I'd like to kick off with one that really encompasses the whole concept of Humboldt. What did Humboldt mean by the unity of nature? And…
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) Yeah.
- (Gloria Kenyon) Go ahead.
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) Yeah. Yeah, what he meant by the unity of nature was everything is interconnected, that there is nothing that stands apart from anything else, and, I mean, to us that sounds pretty obvious, the idea. I mean, we're taught about ecosystems and biomes and downstream consequences. If you've taken any environmental science, if you read the science section of your newspaper or something, that seems really, you know, kind of like it's a no-brainer, but for Humboldt, he's really the first person to kind of start making astute guesses about those things. I will say, for instance, his plant geography map which was made in 1804 based on what he saw at different altitudes in the Andes and in the Alps, we're still using that map 200 years later to understand how climate change has meant that those species are moving around on the mountain, that they are now able to live at higher elevations because the snow and the ice have receded, and so we're using it as a benchmark. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, sort of owes its soul to Humboldt that notion that if you understand all of the variables, that if you recognize that maybe that DDT is, in fact, the culprit in making birds eggs so fragile that they can't hatch properly, and she helps rescue the bald eagle because by removing DDT from our environment eagle's eggs become stronger, baby eagles hatch, and suddenly we're not on the endangered species list anymore. So I think his legacy is that notion that everything affects something else. We talk about the butterfly effects where a butterfly flaps its wings, and the weather changes, you know, halfway around the globe. That notion that everything that happens kicks other things into motion and is influenced by other things is really what kept Humboldt up late at night.
- (Gloria Kenyon) So you sort of touched on this, but the second part of that question was, did he ever use the phrase “web of life,” one that we use today, and if so, where?
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) He did use “web of life,” and, again, you know, part of it has to do with the fact that we read Humboldt in English, we read Humboldt in translation, and, in fact, because Cosmos was translated into over 20 languages there are differences in the actual terminology that is used, but I believe Andrea Wulf uses the term “web of life” in her translation of Humboldt from the original German and French, and so I defer. When she speaks next week we'll have to quiz her on that. But I think that, yes, he did see everything as an interconnected web, and I think “web” is a good term because it's not linear. It's all interconnected, it's interwoven, and it's very much that kind of tapestry.
- (Gloria Kenyon) You talked a lot about Humboldt’s different relationships with people throughout the United States and throughout the world actually, and then you also touched on his ardent abolitionism, and so folks wanted to know, what was Humboldt’s reaction to Jefferson as a slave owner when Humboldt himself was such a committed abolitionist?
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) Humboldt is definitely, particularly early in his career, he is very diplomatic. The gloves come off the older he gets, so with Jefferson he's actually afraid when he gets to the United States he's not important enough for Jefferson to make time for him, and after Jefferson invites him into the White House and says, “You know, come and hang out anytime. You know, let's have dinner. Let's stay up late. Let's talk about this,” he says, Humboldt says, “No monarch in Europe has ever treated me the way Jefferson did,” so there's a tremendous amount of almost familial respect, but it's very clear slavery really bothers him, and so he won't tackle Jefferson head on about it, but he will harangue everybody in Jefferson's orbit as if to try to get to him by proxy. I wish he had. I mean, if he tackled him head-on he did it verbally, and we don't have a written account of it. I somehow, my guess is, he probably needled him about it, but probably didn't actually body slam him about it. He did actually get a lot more traction out of Jefferson on the issue of America's relationship with Native American nations. He writes to him and he says, “I certainly hope that you are planning to figure out how to treat these people as equals.” Jefferson starts his presidency by saying, “We won't take an acre of their land without their permission. They are sovereign nations. We will figure it all out,” and by the end of his second term he's pretty much changed his tune with the addition of Louisiana. He's got territorial governors perched out West who are freaking out, and I think in order to appease them his rhetoric becomes a little bit more harsh in terms of, “We can crush them if we have to.” So he sends Meriwether Lewis out West saying, “Get us ready to negotiate treaties so that we can cross their land and get to where we need to go,” as if we are all going to be partners, and the partnership is clearly not working in his mind by the end of that. And Humboldt is going to be exceedingly frustrated with this. It's going to bedevil him with every connection he has with an American politician or statesman and, in fact, up until three months before he dies, Americans visiting him in Berlin are going to get harangued about the issue of slavery. It's 1859. We are going to tip into Civil War, and Humboldt’s going, “I love you guys. I think of myself as half an American,” but the half he is holding back is the half that will not go along with slavery.
- (Gloria Kenyon) Wow. Impressive. He was so influential in his thinking, so…
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) I mean, I think that's the place where we dug in our heels and said, “Love ya, but we're not going there,” and it's the one place where he could not get traction, and it drove him nuts. You know, it's like, “You listened to me about all these other things. What is your problem?” And I think that particularly as we get through the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe he's just kind of like, “I'm done. I'm done being diplomatic. I'm done being nice about it. I'm just going to let you guys have it.” And, you know, whether it's in Europe or in America, he is really coming down on the side of, as he said, you know, “Without justice there is no prosperity.”
- (Gloria Kenyon) I think you just answered. We had someone who asked, how do you think that his humanitarianism and contestations to colonialism and the treatment of indigenous people complicated his enthusiasm for the American project, and was that enthusiasm largely in the service of advancing his own scientific projects, or were his thoughts on this more complex?
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) I think they're more complex than that. I mean, I think, yes, he definitely saw, “I can add an entire unknown continent to the sum total of the world's knowledge of the Earth, and, yes, this is going to be great,” but he's also farming stuff out and collaborating with other people, so it's not like he's holding it close. He really wants it factored into everything. I really do think that he is like an enlightenment omnivore who is just insanely curious about everything. I do think that the way that…I mean, his commitment to civil rights does not sway. He is…when he wrote up his narrative on traveling through New Spain, he hammered on the ill effects of colonialism. He said, “Pre-Columbian civilizations were once great civilizations that have been beaten down by generations of Spanish rule, and this is horrible.” I mean, it's a wonder. I mean, I'm sure the King of Spain had second thoughts after he got back going, “I let the guy go in there, and this is what I get back along with my data?” So I don't think that Jefferson was under any illusion about the fact that Humboldt could have clearly done exactly the same kind of thing to him. I think that for Humboldt, he so wants American democracy to become a new model to overwhelm and replace European monarchies, and so his friendship with Lafayette, the friendship with Bolivar, the support for the Revolutions of 1848, this is a guy who really wants monarchies dead, and so he is willing to forge alliances that he thinks are going to facilitate that. I will say something else. I mean, we live in an extraordinarily polarized age. Humboldt is an object lesson on how never to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is as though he may hate you as a human being, but if he admires what you did he will cherry pick what you did and then grouse about you as a person, but he won't discount the value in what you said just because of who said it. And this business of, “I can't accept that because it's being articulated by someone whose politics don't match up with mine,” he's like, you know, that would kind of negate half the world's, you know, source of information. So it's interesting watching him weave this path between, “I love your research. I disagree with your conclusions. You're a vile human being, but as long as I've got your data, I can use it for something better, and that will be fine.” So, I mean, there's kind of…I spent a lot of time while I was writing this book thinking about whether or not we as a country could, would, or would want to ever get back to that kind of that level of civility, and I think the way Humboldt squares it is he had such a sharp, sarcastic tongue that at all of the Parisian salons the joke was, which wasn't a joke, everybody was afraid to leave before Humboldt did because they knew that he would start saying snarky things about them the second they left the room. And so he would walk into the salon at, you know, one of his translators and would start telling stories about the people who weren't there, so this is a guy…who was it who said he had “the kindest heart and the most slanderous tongue of any human being I’ve ever met”?
- (Gloria Kenyon) Such a force to be reckoned with.
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) He definitely gets a seat at my Cosmic dinner party across time, yes.
- (Gloria Kenyon) Well, then you would have to wait until he left before you could get up, [laughter] so you might be there for eternity.
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) Exactly.
- (Gloria Kenyon) We have time for one more question. This has been fantastic, and I really appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge. I'm going to take it back to art since we are the Smithsonian American Art Museum, after all. And you talked a lot about Church and Humboldt’s influence on him. Can you talk about some of the other Hudson River School artists or other artists in general that Humboldt influenced?
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) Yeah. I mean, the three artists that I ended up focusing on the most in this exhibition were Charles Willson Peale, who obviously had the benefit of meeting Humboldt and essentially falling for him. It's like, oh my God, Peale saw his museum really as the precursor to the Smithsonian. He asked Humboldt to ask Jefferson, “Buy me out, bring this to Washington, and make a national institute. That would be awesome.” Peale comes out of retirement because of Humboldt. He is so inspired by having him there that he paints his portrait, he paints the Exhumation of the Mastodon, he paints the artist in his museum, drives his kids crazy. And so he becomes a kind of…it's a second wind for his career, and really his whole reason for doing a museum. For Frederic Church it's like the distant mentor he never meets, but is totally enamored with, and I find it interesting that, you know, Church does not go to Europe until the 1860s, long after Humboldt is dead. He does not, in fact, you know, rearrange things to say, “I have to go meet this guy,” but he does absorb everything he can about his books. They're at his library at Olana. He had access to the big expensive volumes in his patrons’ libraries. And really, one of the critics said that Church is the painter that Humboldt so longs for in his writings, and he sets Church up as, you know, the painter’s version of the American Humboldt, the man who Church later on will write in a letter to a colleague, “I wish science would take a ten-year holiday so that I could catch up.” So it's that notion of wanting to know everything about everything and having the hand-to-eye coordination and the vision to make it all come alive. And then interestingly with Samuel F.B. Morse he will, of course, give up his painting career after the Gallery of the Louvre is a colossal disaster, and he will, you know, turn to inventing, and, you know, for Humboldt to console him by saying, “That's okay. You're actually a master in two worlds,” I think it's this respect for understanding that it's the way you treat adversity that matters. And for Morse it's, yeah, it depressed him that he was no longer going to be an artist, but then it was kind of like, “All right, we're going to invent stuff.” And his early, his photographs, his telegraphs, the work on the transatlantic cable, I mean, it's pretty amazing stuff. When I found out that he had inspired Karl Bodmer’s trip to the American West with his patronage of Prince Maximilian, that really was a gamechanger because what it said to me was that I needed to look into American exploration in order to see how art formed a [unintelligible]. There's a whole other show that you could do just on art from explorations, the Long Expedition, the Wilkes Expedition, the Great Western Surveys. The visual record from that is extraordinary, and it all is driven by Humboldt’s sort of ability to do both the analytical and the artistic end of what he does, so I think that for us the Hudson River School in general, there's sort of a level of kind of saturation. It's what's already in the water, so to speak. I mean, Thomas Cole is not really a Humboldtian, but there's clearly through Emerson and through Cooper a lot of Humboldt-by-proxy that ends up in his work. It's really Church who flags it and runs with it, but I expect that it's not that difficult to look at almost all of the Hudson River School artists’ work, particularly [John Frederick] Kensett, [Thomas Worthington] Whittredge, [Sanford Robinson] Gifford, and really see that dedication to close-looking and astute observation that delight in nature that sense of revelation that comes through as being something that they share with Humboldt.
- (Gloria Kenyon) Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Eleanor. This has been really fun and really informative. As Stephanie mentioned at the top, we are opening our doors back up, so please go reserve your tickets on our website, and go visit it in person, and also you can sign up for the rest of the series of talks. Next week will be Andrea Wulf, and you can find all of that information by signing up for our newsletter as just dropped in the chat or at americanart.si.edu. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Thank you again, Eleanor, and thank you, Stephanie, for your time in introducing us earlier this afternoon. Take care everyone.
- (Eleanor Jones Harvey) It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Andrea Wulf
Author
September 23, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
Please note that this program was not recorded.
Randall Griffin
Professor of art history, Southern Methodist University
October 7, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Aerial River Series, Gaia, and the “Web of Life”
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On Wednesday, October 7, 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a lively lecture with Randall Griffin, professor of art history at Southern Methodist University. This is the third lecture in a six-part series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist, and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Learn how Humboldt’s ideas shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment in this thought-provoking lecture.
The exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about the lasting influence of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) with artworks that reveal how the American wilderness became emblematic of the country’s distinctive character. The exhibition includes the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, as well as two paintings by Charles Willson Peale featuring the fossil—Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806–08) and The Artist in His Museum (1822). Featuring this important fossil, that has been in Europe since 1847, emphasizes how natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in 1801 in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Its discovery became a symbol of civic pride. In 1804, Humboldt was honored with a dinner beneath the mastodon exhibited in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia.
Dario Robleto
Artist-at-Large, Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art
October 14, The Curious Confront Eternity
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On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a lively lecture with Dario Robleto, artist-at-large, Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. This is the third lecture in a six-part series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist, and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Learn how Humboldt’s ideas shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment in this thought-provoking lecture.
The exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about the lasting influence of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) with artworks that reveal how the American wilderness became emblematic of the country’s distinctive character. The exhibition includes the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, as well as two paintings by Charles Willson Peale featuring the fossil—Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806–08) and The Artist in His Museum (1822). Featuring this important fossil, that has been in Europe since 1847, emphasizes how natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in 1801 in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Its discovery became a symbol of civic pride. In 1804, Humboldt was honored with a dinner beneath the mastodon exhibited in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia.
- (Dario Robleto) Thank you, Eleanor. Let me just get my screen ready. Well, so, yes, good afternoon. And, Eleanor, thank you. I’d actually like to begin to actually thank you in more detail and just telling you how much I’ve enjoyed our friendship over the years. And I hope everyone got a chance to see Eleanor’s talk and if you didn’t, I highly recommend it. I think everyone that knows Elanor realizes she has this great combination of intelligence and passion and makes learning really contagious and just draws you in deeper and deeper. I’ve learned a lot from you and I really value our friendship. So, thank you.
I also want to thank Andrea Wolf. I don’t know if everybody got to see her talk, but I also hope you will. The author of a book biography on Humboldt. And, as others have mentioned, I really can’t believe how many times reading her book that I kept asking myself, “Why don’t I know more about Humboldt?” Especially I would think I would. It sort of primes to know more about him and yet he’s kind of a non-factor in my education. And I was particular taken with the way she opens the book about literally tens of thousands of people celebrating the centennial of his death in 1869 in Asia, in Australia, the Americas, and in Europe. And it really struck me again why don’t I know this scientist who could elicit such passion from such a diverse body of people literally across the world? And this stunned me a bit because I am a bit of a history buff and I actually really enjoy learning the lineage of the interconnection between art and science. And so, this bothered me that I didn’t know more about this person who I now clearly see has laid the intellectual framework for much of my attitude about art and science today. But I think the fact that I don’t know more about him and the way we are taught or not taught between the arts and sciences about each other’s fields, I think actually says something pretty important that I want to talk about today.
So, here he is, the famous Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist and explorer. One of the last really poly (unintelligible). And I love this painting by him. But as I read on in Andrea’s book and another thing I thought she did so excellently was connect him through other thinkers through time, people like Darwin, Thoreau, Pakal. And how the see of his ideas were kept alive through this intellectual lineage. And then someone really important to me as I’m going to mention, Carl Sagan, and his wife and cowriter, Andrea, who are responsible for the incredible television series, Cosmos. You definitely can see the seed of his idea weaved through these incredible people.
So, I want to say that in no way am I an expert on Humboldt, but I really have committed my life to him and I do have something to say about the core ideas that he ushered into our intellectual rising. And although I would layout this general overview of Humboldt to connect him to my work, I won’t spend a ton of time under his broader life and that’s why I really highly encourage you to watch Eleanor and Andrea’s talks to really flush out the complexity of this mind. But for today, what I’d like to layout is Humboldt’s central insights between science and art in his own time and how the core of that idea has shaped my work. So, in my attempts to kind of briefly summarize Humboldt’s work, you know, this towering mind that would probably be insulted by brevity, here’s what I take away as his sort of central message.
We are bound together. For Humboldt, the separateness or otherness that we feel in relation to nature is really this illusion that crumbles away once we can actually observe the complex cycles of exchange and regeneration that are occurring at the scale of the planet, the whole globe, or the cosmos. And I am very fond of this quote by Humboldt. I think it beautifully explains this point. He writes, “In the Amazon forests, as on the peaks of the Andes, I had the feeling that the same life infiltrates stones, plants, and animals, as well as the swelling breast of humankind, all animated by a single spirit from pole to pole.” You know, this is really a beautiful, soaring observation that connects, as he’s saying, connects all processes of matter together. And crucially, for an artist reading that, what really stands out is he doesn’t try to hide the poetic aspects or the spiritual-like aspects even that are embedded within the scientific pursuit. And this core holistic approach to life and the natural world, this idea that everything is connected, you know, it’s one that we kind of take for granted today and in some sense we could say it’s even a bit of a cliché. But that should never really blind us to the fact of just how radical an idea this was at the time. Even as Andrea points out in the title of her book, someone had to literally invent the concept of nature as we would understand it today. And it is Humboldt who gave us one of the most enduring metaphors of the last 200 years, this idea of the web of life.
So, just think for a second of what that core metaphor has done for us. It is a metaphor that’s turned into action. It’s demanded an extension of ethics and altruism. It’s even demanded new forms of humility and stewardship and care for the natural world. And it changed our sense of a moral responsibility to the future as we conceived of the future, as the planet we would want to leave our children. Essentially, his idea is the background of one of the most consequential ideas of the 20th and 21st century, which is environmentalism. And that idea is going to be core into the centuries ahead as well.
So, with this central insight, Humboldt’s legacy was secure and it definitely helps me better understand why tens of thousands of people would line the streets to celebrate his life and legacy. But what’s really important is the Humboldt went further. And it’s this next point that I really want to celebrate and which resonates the most with me. So, for Humboldt, there was no distinction between art and science. For him, the scientific pursuit, the scientific inquiry into physical reality was not in tension with art in the poetic. In fact, and here’s really, I think, the explanation mark on his idea, it’s the opposite. Science that doesn’t embrace its poetic and emotional dimensions and art that doesn’t grasp the beauty and enchantment of a scientific understanding are both impoverished in the process.
And, again, as an artist thinking about these things, I hear something very provocative. I feel that he’s challenging scientists and artists to do the difficult cross disciplinary work in bridging knowledge. And there’s another little nuance point here I want to stress, that Humboldt’s argument was not one against specialization. You know, he was not against botanists and botany or chemists doing chemistry or sculptors sculpting. But instead, his argument was for the integration of all knowledge, especially if we were going to have any chance and accurate accounting of the true complexity of reality. So, in this data I also want to just briefly nod to Goethe, one of Humboldt’s contemporaries and most influential collaborators who helped refine these radical ideas in art and nature. Goethe calls the merger of scientific observation and personal reflection delicate empiricism. And this really elicits every kind of goosebump in me. I honestly can’t think of anything I’d rather be called than a delicate empiricist.
But Humboldt, in his delicately empirical ways, was making his argument precisely at a moment when science was trying to distance itself from subjectivity, sentiment, and emotions, as if these were somehow contaminants to objective truth. And I think it’s important to say too that the arts and humanities were also becoming quite suspicious of science’s increasing insistence that reductionism and measurement were the only valid forms of truth. And these suspicions would eventually help shape the very sharp lines between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective. But Humboldt’s core ideas never vanished. It’s just that there was this major shift occurring towards specialization without attention to integration.
So, as Humboldt saw and a point that I’ve also spent many years of my life pondering, measurement is not a synonym for meaning. You know, another way of saying this is that he understood that there was a distinction between what is and what matters. And he insisted on the role of emotions and the imagination and understanding the true complexity of life and experience. He saw that no matter our noble ideal of objective, dispassionate truth, we are subjective beings with minds designed to search for meaning between our inner and out world and to look for purpose in a purposeless universe. And instead of subjectivity being this geek to work out of our overall pursuit of knowledge, he argued that art and poetry, like math and physics, are forms of knowing that should be held in equal regard.
So, as an artist such as myself, you know, arguing for the equal legitimacy of art and the pursuit of knowledge seems so obvious as to not really need repeating. But, as I have learned, firsthand over many years, this argument for the collaborative value of art and science must be restated, championed anew, and I think very importantly it must be updated for the times. So, Humboldt’s core idea has remained alive if somewhat dimmed over the past two centuries. But we can see the spirit of his thoughts, as I said earlier, breathing through many great works through time. Walt Whitman kept a copy of Humboldt’s master work “Cosmos” on his desk while he wrote his own masterpiece, “Leaves of Grass.” And you can hear this radical spirit of the possibilities between the poetic and the scientific in one of my favorite lines from Whitman: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It is science that reveals the structure of the atom, but it is art that insists on its humanity and the ethics embedded in such knowledge. And I’m very fond of this quote by Charles Darwin, who would of course do so much in his own regards to enrich our understanding of the connection of life through deep time. And he writes, “I formally admired Humboldt and now almost adore him. He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the tropics.” And this may seem a touching but slight remark, but there’s a lot going on here. You know, we see here like Humboldt’s quote from earlier, there’s this open acknowledgement of the role of subjective feelings working in parallel with the analysis of hard data. And we hear in Darwin’s remark not only how rare it was to openly express such sentiments, but a true longing for the reconciliation between poetry and science.
Whitman and Darwin are just a few of the connecting points that lead to today, but we have a big question to ask here. Why continue in this Humboldtian spirit of integration between the arts and sciences? For example, as a culture, you know, we’ve largely decided that our arts and humanities departments will be on one side of our university campuses and our science departments will be on the other. These seem kind of sorted out and comfortably sectioned off. And in many cases, there’s an outright hostility between the arts and sciences. And I try to keep up with all the competing reasons as to why and I often wonder what Humboldt would make of how these things have played out.
But here I’d like to transition and share a few background points about my own practice that I hope illuminates how and why a contemporary artist should be engaged with science today. So, the first thing I’d like to point out is that for me, not unlike Humboldt’s idea, art is for me more the world view. This philosophy of disciplinary integration, as much as it is an adherence to any particular medium, like painting or sculpture or ceramics. An essence of curiosity has always been very broad with many passions pulling me in many directions. Even, I would say, I’ve actively resisted specialization at this point. And in this sense, for me the category of art functions more like this umbrella turn. For someone who decided to just pick all their passions at once and deal with the consequences. And although this maybe sounds like someone who had ADD, I like to think it’s a bit more purpose driven than that. And this has really led me to believe that my obligation is to all knowledge and every method possible to obtain it, whether reasoned or imaginative, methodical or speculative.
So, with this idea that art is a philosophy of disciplinary integration, a model that I have found very useful in doing this type of work is what I call embeddedness. You know, we’re all familiar of the concept of the embedded journalist and we don’t really need much explanation as to the cultural relevance of that motive of observation. But I found it’s a very useful idea to me, literally in the sense of embedding myself within the fields of sciences that I’m studying and which leads to a third point, also drawing on the ethical lineage of bearing witness because I also believe strongly in the value of poetic and artistic critiques to provoke, refine, or illuminate deep ethical concerns at the heart of science. And this idea of embedding and witnessing allows me to refine one of the most difficult aspects of doing this type of work, which is choosing where and why to begin a conversation with science. There’s just the general principle and joy of reaching across a disciplinary line and learning. But I like to be more refined and specific so that I can really make the case that there is an essential reason for this collaboration to occur. An argument that certain revelations are only possible through this collaboration. So, the scientists I tend to work with are ones that meet certain criteria. Specifically, what I am looking for are examples of thought or technological developments that I would argue are so big that they transcend their field of origin, rippling out across multiple domains of knowledge, often without the originators realizing this because they’re so focused on their own field. And then to really make the case that there’s simply no way to truly understand this phenomenon unless we collaborate across disciplines.
And finally, in the spirit of Goethe’s delicate empiricism and the attention to feelings that Humboldt and Darwin mention, I’m also deeply interested in the emotional knowledge of the scientists that I work with because they are often working at the front line of new types of emotional experiences that if explored properly, I think can really be a source of new creative methods. But as I’ve learned, they are often not allowed or encouraged at least publicly to explore this side of their work. So, with emotions and feelings in mind, I’d like to share some research on a project with you that I really hope honors Humboldt’s argument for the integration of the arts and sciences.
So, over the past 10 years, I’ve really given myself over to knowing the heart and whether through science, art, religion, or philosophy, I don’t care. I just want to know it all. Every incremental step we’ve made through time. And Humboldt’s metaphor of the web of life, for an artist to be interested in the heart is almost this kind of eye rolling cliché. But also like the web of life. There is a reason the metaphor of the heart has stood the test of time and is worthy of constant updating. There’s a reason we have centuries of poems and songs written about the heart and not the liver, kidneys, or lungs. Because historically it was the heart through which our imaginations probed the deepest questions of humanity. In many ways, the heart I would argue is the perfect vessel to ponder Humboldt’s insights. Because just like the eventual segmenting of human knowledge that so deeply concerned Humboldt, the heart would also go through a dramatic severing also split between poetry and science, between metaphor and mechanics. And I believe when we consider the stunning current day scientific developments occurring within the science of the heart, the severing of poetry and science really puts us at a disadvantage when engaging with these latest breakthroughs. So, in the broadest historical strokes, the heart was split in two by competing interpretations of its function and its meaning. On one side you have the religious interpretation that argues that the heart was the literal vessel of the soul and identity. This conduit between the immaterial and material realms and the literal home of one’s emotions and free will. And today, you know, this ancient argument about where one’s identity resides in the body or one’s consciousness has largely moved up to the brain. But for much of history, this was a question for the heart. And think of how much we still use these ideas day to day. When we follow love, we give our hearts to each other to be authentic or honest just to wear our hearts on our sleeves or to have heart to hearts. If you’re religious, salvation is often couched within your God knowing what’s in your heart and so on.
But because the heart was considered a sacred vessel and at some level infallible and supernaturally designed, it took centuries for it to be thoroughly studied scientifically. And even then, these studies were always done on autopsied bodies or on animals. And even then, these studies were quite controversial at the time. The technological capabilities to study a living heart just had not been developed. It was literally impossible to cut into someone’s chest without killing them, for example. And religiously speaking, even if we could have done this, it would have been unheard of to poke around in or even look upon a living human heart because of its assumed divinity.
But once science got involved, everything changed. And with massive medical, philosophical, and cultural consequences upending the debate about where one’s soul and identity is located in the body. Da Vinci’s famous studies and drawings of the heart started to reveal its mechanical-like processes suggesting that it was nothing more than a complicated pump and there was no need for supernatural explanations. This secularization of the heart would continue for centuries with each new revelation about its function convincingly suggesting that not only could we study it, but we could alter it. We could perform surgery on it and, most radically, we could replace it when it malfunctions. And it is here that I want to point your attention to heart transplantation, a phenomenon we have mostly absorbed into culture, but which I still think clearly demands a collaboration between science and art to fully understand. So, to do that work and better understand the contemporary divide between the scientific and poetic heart, I’ve been in collaboration and conversation with a number of heart surgeons and researchers. I’ve witnessed heart transplants in both humans and animals. I’ve interviewed many transplant recipients and I’ve done a number of artistic studies on the latest artificial heart technologies. But I want to tell you, even with those years of work and preparation, nothing quite prepared me for the awe that is the ghost heart. This incredible thing that you’re looking at, it was invented by Dr. Doris Taylor of the Texas Heart Institute and it is one of the most intellectually and emotionally complex objects I’ve ever seen in my life. To try to overcome the lingering global problems of heart disease, organ transplantation shortages, antirejection drugs, and the still pretty limited reliability of artificial hearts, she asked a very provocative question. She asked, “Can we regrow our hearts again?” And to this end, she’s invented a way to literally wash our hearts clean of all of their cells, revealing something never seen before, the heart as a matrix, as pure form. In fact, as an artist looking at it, one of the most provocative questions she has inspired in me is to ask, “Has she discovered the fundamental form of the heart?” Like the logic of a seashell, this extracellular matrix is the substance cells secrete to give themselves a home. Without this bio scaffolding between the cells, they would not know how to align with each other, failing in their purpose to keep us alive. And like much great art, Dr. Taylor has given form to something hiding. The heart shell is in every one of us right now. And her hope is to one day repopulate this heart architecture with a patient’s own cells and watch it grow back into a fully functioning heart. And here's a short video of her testing a structural integrity. And I want to say one more time as you watch this, this would be your heart. It would be made of your cells and DNA and it would open up a mind-bending era of giving our own hearts back to ourselves. And I’d like you to just ponder the complexity of what you are seeing here – a disembodied heart without a history, now washed clean of all of its cells, reduced to pure form, hovering in space as it is made to beat again. And although Dr. Taylor is driven by the most noble and humanitarian of concerns, there is the poetic and cultural facing side of the ghost heart that really must be thought through.
So, as history has shown us, each time we tinker with the pure mechanics of the heart, we inevitably provoke deep seated philosophical, spiritual, artistic, and even ethical questions about the soul, emotions, and life and death. All things that we like to think we’ve pretty much resolved. It is not a coincidence that the first generation of spouses who watch their partners receive heart transplants ask them if they still love them after surgery. We can dismiss this as trite or misinformed or overly sentimental, that the heart is really nothing more than a fancy pump. But as an artist, I will tell you that that is a big mistake. For it is in these spouses’ concerns that millennial long questions about identity and recognition, intimacy and emotions are playing out again. And this is not a trivial matter. The way we understand our hearts, the metaphors we build to express the most complex aspects of our being have real world consequences. As Humboldt would say, everything is connected. How we understand the biology of the heart and how we understand the intertwinement of emotions at the sight of the heart is connected to the types of intimacy that we can imagine and to the creation of new poetic forms that give meaning to our lives. If we are about to enter an age of ghost heart exchange, an age where a 50 or 70-year-old person can carry within them they’re newly reborn heart again, then I would argue we are at one of these moments that I mentioned earlier, a scientific development that has transcended its field of origin and it needs a healthy conversation with the arts and humanities. For there is really an opportunity here to critique if we choose to or expand the behaviors and metaphors we use on how we relate to and care for each other.
And in this next image, all my hopes for such collaborative contemplation are on display. When unexpectedly Dr. Taylor asked if I would like to hold the ghost heart, you know, this huge leap of trust to an artist by a scientist that had no real scientific value for her to do so, I knew that we had crossed this threshold that I am always striving for between a level of respect and trust between our disciplines. And as I adjusted to the surprising weight of this elemental form, she began pointing the vascular features that I would have missed otherwise and I couldn’t help but to ponder what the Egyptians would have made of the ghost heart. This is a culture that left the heart in mummified bodies because it was needed to enter the afterlife. It's lightness of weight signally one’s worthiness into the afterlife. And as I held and sat with the ghost heart, pondering all it might one day be, I felt obligated to reflect on what it had been. And as I watched it beat, I was overcome with mourning and loss, but for what exactly? This person was gone. Their cells now literally washed away. They had donated their body for important scientific reasons, to save other lives. And yet, did something remain of them? Had Dr. Taylor found the material edge of identity, that boundary line before we are indistinguishable from dust on the breeze. Dr. Taylor’s ghost heart, I would really argue, demands new ways of thinking about identity and form, life and death, rejection and recognition.
So, as part of our collaboration, we have taken this conversation on the road, so to speak, and to date we have held three public events speaking about the poetic and scientific implications of her work. And I put this up because it’s a very important part of what I do as an artist, as I really believe that these collaborations should have a public facing side to show how these types of conversations can proceed. But Dr. Taylor has inspired much more from me. In particular, it is this deep reflection on the boundary line of identity at the sight of the heart that has informed a series of works centered on the central question: What do we owe to the memory of each other’s hearts? And one way to respond to this question, I believe, lies somewhere in the deep history of two images that we rarely reflection anymore: the pulse wave and the flatline. You know, these are really such simple things: a line moving over time, pretty inconsequential images until it is your loved one whose heart is being registered on a monitor. But like the entire history of our quest to understand the heart, in particular our quest to record its invisible actions, there’s a lot more going on here. And so, for the past several years, I’ve investigated the cultural and technological history behind the quest to record the living human heart. We’re also trying to find new ways to deepen empathetic and ethical bonds to these types of historical data. So, first developed as a visualization of the beating heart, the pulse wave really was a revolutionary form of scientific inscription. But like I mentioned earlier, it has become this routine marker of health and medicine. But at its inception in the mid-19th century, it also held the potential for radical new possibilities of attunement, tenderness, reciprocity, and empathy. Essentially, it opened up a new way of knowing another’s heart and I think it still holds that possibility today. So that the first instrument to capture human pulse wave was developed in 1853 using incredibly a stylus made of a single human hair to trace an oscillating white line until a micro thin layer of soot that had been gathered from a candle frame on a piece of paper. The invention of the pulse wave would revolutionize medicine, inaugurating cardiology in the process. And, of course, as we know, it saved numerous lives through better and more precise diagnostics. But even though these scientists were motivated by care and concern in these early years, of course to better diagnose disease, these scientists also inadvertently created the modern abstraction of the human body into clinical data. And I think severing empathetic pathways to the individual that has had profound consequences on our healthcare industry. And because it was birthed within physiology and not art, the pulse wave has remained as mere medical data in the public consciousness. And I think it has been overlooked both artistically and art historically as a significant innovation in the history of the expression of emotion through image and mark making.
So, laying dormant since the mid-19th century, tens of thousands of anonymous hearts have resided in medical books and archives as pulse waves. Now mostly useless by today’s standards of diagnostic instruments, but nonetheless I would argue each represent a lived life and an untapped narrative of experiential and emotional knowledge that demands a different approach to their reading. And like the ghost heart, these people gave their hearts to science. And the way I look at it, they gave their hearts to us to the future. And like all such gestures of giving your heart to another, there is zero guarantee it will be received or remembered unless we all agree to carry each other’s hearts forward. The question is how to recover in more heartfelt ways the late sense data embedded within these white forms. And because these early subjects were often poor and sick and injured, their names were rarely recorded. But in each of these earliest white forms is a person who lived and loved, felt fear and anger, and excitement – all expressions of their humanity that I really believe should be resuscitated from obscurity.
So, in my own work, I want to completely upend our current ideas of data mining and inject our humanity back into these abstract signals. So, keeping in mind Humboldt, the ghost heart, the pulse wave, and this deep concern about the unforeseen implications of severing art from science, I’d like to share this project I’ve been working on for many years. And, as I mentioned earlier, these early efforts of using the pulse wave technology was, of course, to document disease. And when one digs into these archives as I have, it is an overwhelming experience to witness all of this past suffering, all these broken hearts, and the ways that our bodies can fail us. But as I dug deeper into these archives, I started to notice something else, something that was clearly tangential to the main study of disease, but which seemed to hint at this tension between data and humanity that I mentioned. I started to notice that what I call these outlier recordings, outlier in the sense that these wave forms were not about disease, but instead about a heart simply living its life in all of its normalcy and even its mundanity. For example, instead of whooping coughs or typhus, I found the tracing of a heart after having a glass of wine or going for a long walk in the country or even the first time a heart was recorded after somebody ate some chocolate. And then a challenge immediately presented itself to me. Here are these outlier recordings. Could I tell an alternate history of the first images of the heart from birth to death, one in which we witness, as I said, a heart simply living its life? And it took me close to five years, but I finally tracked down 50 heart waves and weaved together this alternate history of the heart and led to this piece entitled “The First Time the Heart: A Portrait of Life, 1854 to 1913.” It’s a portfolio of 50 prints but also contains an essay about my research. But because I wanted to honor the original way that these tracings had been made, I worked with a phenomenal print making team called Island Press who were more than game to try some really ambitious experimental print making techniques. Because our problem was this: How do we make a permanent print in soot from a candle flame? And as I mentioned, the scientist who originally made these recordings used single hairs as styluses and soot from candle flames. And they did this because of these materials’ exquisite sensitivity in measuring the almost imperceptible movements deep within the body. And so, after years of tracking down these original pulse tracings, we devised this complex and kind of ridiculously delicate procedure where we lithograph the way form on paper with transparency. We then hand-setted the paper with candle flames. We dipped this image into a fixit of bath often reminding me of Dr. Taylor’s washing of hearts. And then excavated the line back out of the soot. Sometimes even with paint brushes that we made ourselves with single strands of hair.
For time, I’m going to have to skip over several steps here and making this sound way easier than it actually was. But the part that I want to point out and that mattered to me most was the excavation. And it’s really hard to describe how emotional it was to perform this type of meditative surgery, retracing these century old anonymous hearts, remembering them, feeling them, doing my best to pull them back from the brink of erasure. And it's a rather massive work when installed together. It’s 50 different hearts from different times, different places, and different experiences. But together they create one line, one heart, moving through time. And here are some of the prints and the varieties of experiences I was able to track down. You know, with all the ways that we excel at finding what’s different about us, in these images I think we can be reminded what we have in common. No matter who you are, it is quite likely your heart looks very similar when you’re smelling lavender, just as this person in 1896. Or having a drought of milk when you’re having trouble sleeping. Somebody left their heart behind telling that this happened. They did this. Or something oddly specific as this, which I just love. A young lady, 28, much debilitated by prolonged mental work, the entertainment of company, and the cares of a large household. These studies or really these documents as I said, snapshots into lives we can all relate to. An ear lightly touched with a feather while sleeping. The first time a heart was recorded as they felt sadness from listening to a sung melody. For the first time, a mother was recorded in unison with her soon to be born child while still in vitro. And, as I mentioned, a lot of these people are forgotten and in every case that I can, I do my best to remember and find out who these people were. And I point out too here, which I can’t tell you their stories, but these two people in particular are very important to me and I’m working on some projects to fully tell their story again.
And I also mentioned earlier that one of the goals of this work is to find new ways to tap into the latent emotional meaning within this abstracted data. And the prints allow for a certain type of visual resurrection. But I also wanted to explore touch and sound, two other sensory experiences so crucial to how we know the heart. And what inspired this is as we move a bit forward in time, we find that although the initial studies were propelled by the study of disease, tentatively, these early physiologists did start to ponder the hidden materiality of love, fear, joy, and the myriad ways that we can express ourselves. A new field is even burst in the process, called emotionology. And this inspired a series of sculptures where I tracked done like in the print project all the various first instances of a heart being recorded under various emotional experiences or rather when having dreams. And then through another complex technical process that I won’t go over, I was able to turn these two-dimensional pulse waves into three-dimensional brass and steel sculptures, allowing one to literally carry the weight of another’s heart through time. Each of these weight forms is so special with really heartbreaking stories behind them. And perhaps none more emotional to me than to be able to hold in my hands the first time a heart was recorded while someone experienced egregious guilt in 1878. And then currently, writing a book with my coauthor, Jennifer Roberts, will really highlight the story and tell it in its full complexity.
And finally, before I wrap up, I think one of the most provocative collaborations to come out of this work is with my friend and colleague, the media historian, Patrick Feaster. Feaster and his colleagues have revolutionized the way we think about historical sounds. And he’s devised a way to resurrect sound that was recorded before the actual invention of sound recording. And this is just mindboggling and so exciting to me. And what I mean by this is that there are a couple of decades before Thomas Edison’s groundbreaking invention of playback technology where acoustic scientists had figured out how to visually record sound as wave forms. But their only objective at this point was to visually look at the waves afterwards. The notion of playing the sound back as we would understand it today was still many years away. Though with custom-designed software, Patrick has figured out a way to play back these pre-Edison soundwaves, allowing us to hear in his case voices that were truly considered lost to time. And because their earliest heartbeat tracings were also essentially visual wave forms of sound, we can apply this approach to the early history of the heart, allowing us for the first time in history to literally hear hearts beating from the middle of the 19th century. And to date, we have resurrected a number of heart sounds allowing us, I think, this new empathetic pathway to the past. And this work continues as we are challenging ourselves to just how far back in time we can pull fossilized sounds back from oblivion. And unfortunately, these sounds are incredibly difficult to hear through a computer speaker or I’d play some for you. But instead, here his one way we have decided to present this piece and sculpture an audible form. And, as you see here, it’s also designed through research. The images that accompany each story, all of these sounds were also pressed to vinyl. But the key is that the viewers can read the story that accompanies this sound, but also very importantly to me, they can hear it. And moving down through six different headphones, they can literally hear a heart moving through the 19th century.
So, actually see that I’m hitting my mark on time. So, I’m going to end here and hopefully we can take some questions. And I really want to thank everyone for taking the time out of your day to listen to this. And I hope this inspires you to see the show or to read Andrea’s book. But most importantly, I hope it helps you to become more aware and sensitive to just what is at stake culturally for our society or even just individually when we are taught or forced to totally separate science from art or our emotions from our intellect. And I know I don’t need to tell anyone that we are living in a pretty complicated, historical moment that at its worst is distancing us. It’s highlighting what is different about each other and eroding some of our most vital emotional tools, such as empathy and compassion. And as much as I love science, I know that some aspects of it, especially through certain technologies, are playing a crucial role in disrupting our emotional health. And we have to find a way and I hope Humboldt is a good guide here and I hope I can contribute in my own small way to find a way to balance the increasing technological upheavals we will face as a society with an equal call to arms of our poetic and emotional capabilities. We need the best of science and art working together and we always have, which I think makes Humboldt’s ideas even more powerful and relevant today. So, thank you so much for your time and I hope we have some questions to look at.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Oh, we have questions. [Laughs].
- (Dario Robleto) Great.
- (Eleanor Harvey) And not surprisingly, Dario, we’ve got great philosophical questions.
- (Dario Robleto) Wonderful.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Yeah. The one that I want to start with is more of an observation which struck me. One of our listeners this afternoon remarked that “When looking at the photograph of you helping to hold the ghost heart, it struck her as being a 21st century vision of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling where the rhythms of creativity are again being repeated.”
- (Dario Robleto) Wow, wow, that’s a high standard to meet. And I can’t say I purposely posed it. It was a completely random shot and I loved how our fingers were almost touching but not quite.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Exactly.
- (Dario Robleto) Yeah.
- (Eleanor Harvey) No.
- (Dario Robleto) Yeah, that’s a good observation.
- (Eleanor Harvey) It’s to totally spectacular.
- (Dario Robleto) Yeah.
- (Eleanor Harvey) We do have a question specifically – I mean, the ghost heart, oh, my God. I mean, I’ve been following your work for a decade and I’m always blown away by something that you’re working on. And I remember when you had your SARS fellowship here and you posed the question: What does it mean not to have a heartbeat? Because that was an optional add on for the early artificial hearts because we didn’t really need one, but that’s what we benchmarked on. And I just remember going home that afternoon just having to pick up the pieces of trying to even talk this and I thought – and so, the ghost heart, one of the questions that I would echo is Dr. Taylor seems to be a really unusual person. And I’m wondering how often you run into scientists like her who are able to really understand in a really profound way what you think of about transcending around this (unintelligible)?
- (Dario Robleto) Oh, I’m so glad you asked that because I get to brag about her a little more. So, the small credit I will take is that I do my homework. And, as I mentioned in my layout, you know, I’m looking for certain types of things and I love this model of the artist as the observer on the front lines of these types of ecological or medical upheavals. And, you know, I have the sensibility. I’ve done the work, as I said, to more precisely know what’s different about that ghost heart that his different than the hundred other such experiments playing out on the heart today, all equally fascinating, but I don’t think quite hit that transcendent level where, okay, she’s crossed into philosophy. She’s crossed into religion. She’s crossed into ancient questions about consciousness and where it resides. Where your identity is in your body. She’s like hitting every mark for me that intrigues me. And, you know, I will say that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she is the incredible, generous, openminded, I would say – I often tell her, you know, she meets sort of my criteria as an artist in her provocativeness and the questions she asks. But the thing she made is so beautiful.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Yeah.
- (Dario Robleto) You know, it wasn’t driven by esthetics. It was driven by biological needs. And yet, she made one of the most compelling and interesting things I’ve ever seen. But my point is that I don’t think it’s coincidental that the personality type that I’ve met in her is doing this type of work. Because you need to have certain other things in place to kind of go out that far on a limb. And, as I said, she’s driven by these beautifully noble reasons of savings lives. I mean, she is driven to save people’s lives and she’s willing to go there even if – you know, as an artist, as much as I admire it, I want us to be critical of it too. Is this okay? Like with a beatless heart, is that okay as a society? Are we cool with science saying the beating of your heart is optional? And in this case, the idea that we can continually upgrade our heart when necessary is at minimum worthy of our time to reflect on as a society outside of the science. So, Dr. Taylor is really willing to have these conversations and she’s remarkable in that regard because she is an anomaly. I’ve met a lot of heart surgeons and they are surely brilliant, wonderful people, but they are not the most emotionally available people that I’ve met. And that’s fine because I realize they got to departmentalize in some way. But Dr. Taylor, our conversations, it’s like I’m talking to my best artist friends. She is not afraid to go there and not only not afraid, but as I hope I’ve been arguing, she sees it’s necessary that she can’t answer all these other questions. That she did her work, whether she intended to or not. It’s here. She provoked another set of questions. And other people need to ask her and talk about it. And to her credit, she’s open to having that conversation.
- (Eleanor Harvey) I mean, that’s really the Humboldtian piece of what you’re both doing. We’ve had a lot of questions, different iterations on the same kinds of concern about how you reintegrate art and science? What happens when you reintegrate it? Is there a downside to trying to kind of homogenize that, as opposed to having it remain multifaceted? And I guess the question that I would ask you that kind of wraps a lot of those together is when you think about the fact that Humboldt is arguing for the blending of art and science. He says that scientists need to retain a sense of esthetic wonder in the world and artists need to know enough science to know what it is they’re doing. And so, I guess the setup question is it seems to me that all of the people that you have collaborated with have either overtly or unconsciously striven for that kind of Humboldtian synthesis of art and the science. They sense that something is going to happen that is more than the sum of its parts.
- (Dario Robleto) Yes, it’s true. I have enough of these collaborations now to start to even compare personality traits in them. And you’re right. I mean, it’s not a coincidence that I’m drawn to that personality type myself. And I will say that in my deep dive in Humboldt, not one of them has ever heard of Humboldt either. And it’s been a joy to talk to them about it, which you know how I open the talk. And Andrea talks about in her book some possible reasons why he’s sort of fallen through the cracks in some sense even though it’s weird to say because he has a show at the Smithsonian about him and you’re helping to correct some of those things, at least in the U.S. And I think it’s really important because, you know, as I said, I want to know what I’m connected to. I think these people that I work with are striving. They would love to know better context. Every time I’ve worked with a scientist, they have, first, they’ve been surprised that an artist is interested, which then surprises me. And I think gives me a nice insight into the way our education system is set up in our country in that it’s not obvious that this is transcendent and that we need a philosopher involved and we need an artist involved and we need a heart surgeon involved. Anyway, my point is that I see that Humboldt’s spirit has eroded to such a state that we have to do some real basic rebuilding here. Like that in the sense that the other side would even think that we’d be interested in what they’re doing. And so, I already come fully interested obviously. And so, we can move past that. But I’ve learned that I have to sort of build this framework with them to talk about their work in completely different ways than they’re accustomed to or not allowed to. And, you know, that really saddens me that the sciences in general, whether explicitly or implicitly, sort of require one to repress some emotional or the outward expression of that. I know that they’re having the feeling. So, there’s expressing it. But then I’m arguing, “But let’s do something with it. Like let’s make it creative.” And what I’m trying to argue the most as an artist is that I’m arguing their untapped, new creative forms in that terrain that they are seeing in their emotional experiences. If there’s something there that in back over the arts trigger a new line of thought or a technical method. And so, I’m really big on getting down in the weeds in that way in their emotional experience because I do look at them as the frontline of new types of experiences that have creative potential.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Well, I remember talking to you about a project that you were working on in Houston at the Menil when you were working with the folks in neuroscience in Houston and they wanted to chart brainwaves when people were having esthetic experiences. And I remember your telling me that when you said to them, “You can’t do that in an MRI tube. going to have to take the probes out into an esthetically sympathetic environment.” And you figured out together how to do – forgive me – a skullcap with the electrodes and you were able to have people walk through one of your exhibitions and record the brainwave activity and then begin to tease out by, you know, by sex, by age, by race and begin to understand how the brain processes what we think of as an esthetic and emotional reaction. And I know we don’t have time to go into all of that today, but I guess it’s my way of saying to our audience, “Oh, my God, Google Dario’s work because it’s a deep dive. It’s amazing. And each one of those projects takes one of those core philosophical questions at the juncture of art and science and just kind of explodes it into this little universe.
- (Dario Robleto) Thank you, Eleanor.
- (Eleanor Harvey) I feel like I can’t wait for this pandemic to release so you and I can get together and we can go look through all of this stuff. Because what year was the chocolate wavelength? Do you remember off the top of your head?
- (Dario Robleto) That was a rare – at least in the ones that I was searching for. I think it was 1912, maybe 1913.
- (Eleanor Harvey) 1912?
- (Dario Robleto) Yeah, that’s the – well, no, it would have been 1912. Yeah, to me the golden period of this is 1853 to 1913.
- (Eleanor Harvey) That’s amazing. That is just totally amazing. But just the fact that someone would think to take such, on the one hand, quotidian things and either see if there was something unique or provocative about it is just really interesting. You know, to your point about losing Humboldt, Lee Augustine, 1869, at the centennial mentioned that every schoolchild in America had been taught by Humboldt, but he didn’t know the name of his teacher. And that’s how diffuse it had already begun even though we hadn’t lost his name. And it’s Teddy Roosevelt in Yosemite in 1903 who was cranking on the American education system for separating the arts and sciences. He said we’re only training specialists. We’ve given up on training people like Humboldt. And I think the work that I see you doing, though I’m delighted you’re collaborating with Jennifer Roberts, that’s the restitching together and the reintegration, I think, of the arts and the sciences where it becomes ridiculous to think that we could ever function separate from each other.
- (Dario Robleto) That’s what I want. I wanted to feel ridiculous that we’re not functioning together.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Well, you and I are on a mission.
- (Dario Robleto) Rather than being surprised.
- (Eleanor Harvey) You and I are on a mission together and I think we’ve got Humboldt in our corner for that.
- (Dario Robleto) Yes. I am very thankful to have learned so much more about him through this show.
- (Eleanor Harvey) Oh, my God, this has just been awesome. We could go on for days and I would enjoy that. But I think we are going to have to sort of wrap this up at this point. So, what I want to say to everyone here is don’t stop with this. Tell your friends they could come back and watch this when we get it cleaned up and put up online. And then next week, Tom Lovejoy is going to join us. He’s a tropical biologist who used to work for the Smithsonian. He now does work with the United Nations. But he's really going to sort of think about Humboldt for the Modern Age. Riffing off of, I think, some of the ideas that Dario’s been talking about today, that Randy Griffin talked about last week, that Andrea has done, and that I’ve tried to pull together in this exhibition.
And now what I’d really like to remind all of you is that, you know, as you know, the Smithsonian is a nonprofit organization and we’re able to share free digital content like this with you thanks to funding from generous supporters, many of whom are in our audience today. We’d like you to please consider showing your support with a donation. We’ve put a link to donate on our website down in the Chat feature so that you can help out if you have the opportunity. And thank you again so much for being with us. Dario, thank you so much for once again just blowing my mind. I’m going to be thinking about ghost hearts, watching them beat in this beautiful, elegant, eloquent way probably or the rest of the night.
- (Dario Robleto) Wonderful. Thank you for inviting me.
- (Eleanor Harvey) What a pleasure.
- (Dario Robleto) Okay. See you later.
- (Eleanor Harvey) All right.
Tom Lovejoy
Professor of environmental science, George Mason University
October 21, Alexander von Humboldt: Polymath of His Time
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On Wednesday, October 28, 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a lively lecture with Tom Lovejoy, professor of environmental science, George Mason University. This is the third lecture in a six-part series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist, and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Learn how Humboldt’s ideas shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment in this thought-provoking lecture.
The exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about the lasting influence of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) with artworks that reveal how the American wilderness became emblematic of the country’s distinctive character. The exhibition includes the original Peale Mastodon skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, as well as two paintings by Charles Willson Peale featuring the fossil—Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806–08) and The Artist in His Museum (1822). Featuring this important fossil, that has been in Europe since 1847, emphasizes how natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in 1801 in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Its discovery became a symbol of civic pride. In 1804, Humboldt was honored with a dinner beneath the mastodon exhibited in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia.
George Steinmann
Artist, musician, and researcher
October 28, Looking from Within: Art in the Horizon of the UN Agenda 2030
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On Wednesday, October 28, 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a lively lecture with artist, musician and researcher George Steinmann. This is the sixth lecture in a six-part series that examines the profound impact of Alexander von Humboldt, a renowned Prussian naturalist, and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. Learn how Humboldt’s ideas shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment in this thought-provoking lecture.
The exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about the lasting influence of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) with artworks that reveal how the American wilderness became emblematic of the country’s distinctive character. The exhibition includes the original Peale Mastodon skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, as well as two paintings by Charles Willson Peale featuring the fossil—Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806–08) and The Artist in His Museum (1822). Featuring this important fossil, that has been in Europe since 1847, emphasizes how natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in 1801 in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Its discovery became a symbol of civic pride. In 1804, Humboldt was honored with a dinner beneath the mastodon exhibited in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia.
Learn more about Humboldt in Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture. This landmark exhibition examines Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. The exhibition centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity, grounded in an appreciation of the landscape. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.
The lecture series The World of Alexander von Humboldt is made possible by support from the Provost of the Smithsonian for Earth Optimism programming.