An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
SynopsisPlot
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However, this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole.
Story
About this book
Johan Moritz Rugendas was a real German painter, born in 1802, who spent years traveling through Latin America to record its landscapes. In this short novel, Cesar Aira takes him as a subject without writing a biography. The story follows one episode during the painter's ride across the Argentine pampas, the wide grass plains that stretch inland from Buenos Aires.
Rugendas traveled on the advice of Alexander von Humboldt, who urged European artists to document Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Behind the trip lay a stranger aim: to reach what Humboldt described as physiognomic totality, a single image able to hold the complete character of a place. Aira compresses that large ambition into a few days of open country.
The novel turns on the moment when the landscape stops being a calm subject and begins to act on the painter himself. Beauty and the grotesque sit close together here, and the book keeps asking how much of nature one picture can carry. Aira is among Argentina's most prolific living writers, known for short and unpredictable works of fiction.
