FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will present I Like America - Fictions of the Wild West, on view 28 September 2006 – 7 January 2007. Beginning around 1825, a wave of enthusiasm for the American Wild West arose in German-speaking Europe. Set into motion primarily by the translation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales it was further encouraged by both the performances of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” in Germany and Austria and, of course, Karl May’s books. The exhibition explores for the first time how the German fascination with the Wild West manifested itself in the visual arts there between 1825 and 1950. It also questions the degree to which these representations were informed by icons of American visual culture. “I Like America” will present more than 150 paintings, films, drawings, engravings, and documentary material, including works by American and German artists such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Bierstadt, George Grosz, Auguste Macke, Emil Nolde, and Carl Wimar in fathoming the vagaries of the fictitious American West.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Bank of America, N. A. and Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP. Additional support comes from American Airlines and the United States Embassy.

Max Hollein, director of the Schirn: “A complex, many-faceted exhibition on America as a projection screen for German American longings and patters of reception, ‘I Like America’ not only comprises numerous paintings, drawings, and films but also documentary material conveying an idea of various presentations and works with which leading American and German artists and commercially oriented entrepreneurs mediated an image of the Wild West to a broad-based public in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Dr. Pamela Kort, curator of the exhibition: Neither the American nor the German attitudes toward the Wild West had much connection to reality. They provide, however, an index of the way that society at large in both countries reacted to manufactured images of cowboys and Indians harnessed to very different ideologies. Although the subject has long interested scholars, I Like America: Fictions of the Wild West is the first exhibition to explore Germany’s persistent enthusiasm for the Wild West and its relationship to American art and politics between 1825 and 1974.

The title “I Like America” references the enthusiasm for the American Wild West in German-speaking Europe that emerged in the early nineteenth century. It was then that increasing numbers of Germans, hopeful that there they might establish settlements in the untouched countryside, began to emigrate to the United States between 1830 and 1840, more than 150,000 Germans immigrated to the United States; In 1848, the number grew to more than 100,000 in this year alone. Eager for information, many potential German-speaking emigrants read the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales” novel, The Pioneers (1823), which had been translated in 1826. As the century marched on, numerous illustrated weekly newspapers, such as Die Gartenlaube, the Illustrirte Zeitung published in Leipzig, and Das Pfennig-Magazin, also helped to satisfy the growing thirst for images and travel narratives. The representations of the Wild West that these magazines contained were just as multifaceted as the reports themselves. Together, they presented a most lively picture of a land characterized by beauty, adventure, isolation, and bounty.

A readiness to embrace the Indian as a kind of blood-brother remains unique to Germany. In America, however, by 1850, the “Red Man” had come to connote a dangerous savage, who frontiermen, soldiers, and cowboys sought to bring under control. The opening of the West from the 1830s to the 1850s also enabled explorers and artists such as the George Catlin to travel the frontier between “civilization” and “wilderness” and document the life and rituals of the Indians, who were regarded as destined to extinction as though “by a law of their nature”. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s evocation of the bond between natural science and artistic feeling, German expeditioners Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied and Herzog Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg invited artists Karl Bodmer, a native Swiss, and the German Balduin Möllhausen to join them on their journies into the American West.

Indians also traveled to Germany. Amongst the earliest and certainly the most celebrated of these was George Copway, an Ojibwa by the name of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bow. In 1850 he came to Frankfurt, having been invited to represent the Christian Indians of America in at the third World Peace Congress there. The liberal-revolutionary attitude characteristic of German Vormärz politics with its attendant zeal for democratic America caused Copway – the only Indian to attend this dignified gathering – to become its sensation. The result was not only widespread coverage in numerous periodicals but also Emanuel Leutze’s painting of his portrait. Not surprisingly, Leutze chose to call this image Der letzte Mohikaner. A celebrated German-born American painter active in Düsseldorf between 1845 and 1858, Leutze was joined there by other younger German-born American painters, Carl Wimar and Alfred Bierstadt amongst them. Painting mainly Indians and a few pioneers, Wimar became known as the Düsseldorf’s “Indian Painter”. The popular reception of the young artists’ work in Germany evidences the veracity of the phenomenon of “German Indian enthusiasm,” which he mined for all it was worth.

After the Civil War, Americans increasingly obtained their images of the West from the illustrated accounts of the “Indian Wars,” as well as from celebratory literature. George A. Custer, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and especially Buffalo Bill were fit into templates established decades earlier, now marshaled to support the pursuit of solving the “Indian problem.” Masquerading as authentic representations of the American West, Buffalo Bill’s shows were dominated by well-behaved cowboys rounding up ‘wild’ Indians and lassoing dangerous animals. Not long thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington firmly roped these exciting circus images to a functional mythology that could be applied when it came to facing new challenges in Spanish America. Roosevelt’s immensely successful books, Ranch Life and Hunting Trail (1888; with illustrations by Remington) and The Winning of the West (1889–1896), coupled with his growing status as a war hero, helped land him in the White House in 1901 and keep him there until 1909.