Reviewed by: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture by Eleanor Jones Harvey Laura Dassow Walls (bio) Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture eleanor jones harvey Smithsonian American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press 2020 444 pp. Few books on Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century's world-famous explorer, scientist, and popular writer, are fully equal to their subject; this one is. It was created to accompany the exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, which opened in March 2020—just days after COVID-19 shut down the nation—and ran through July 2021. Fortunately the exhibit lives on, thanks to the online materials which include an illuminating video tour and a trove of additional educational materials, suitable for classroom use from elementary grades through college courses. [End Page 302] Even more fortunately, the exhibit will live on for decades to come in the pages of this magnificent book. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the SAAM, has not only assembled a stunning exhibition; she has also written a panoramic narrative that takes in the full sweep of nineteenth-century American science, politics, art, literature, and culture. The result is a mammoth volume, its dense text leavened with scores of supplemental illustrations and interleaved with 110 full-color plates reproducing the exhibition's artworks and historical documents, the whole beautifully bound and wrapped in a lavish cover. This all makes it look superficially like an exhibit catalogue, a coffee-table book suitable for idle browsing. It may be that, but it's also much, much more, a book that begs to be read and reread. The more one studies the complex conversation offered here between the narrative and images, the more pathways it opens for further inquiry. As for the text itself, Harvey has written a rich, detailed, and lengthy scholarly monograph that brings Humboldt's America, and Humboldt himself, fully to life. She draws on the full range of world scholarship on Humboldt (including several works by the author of this review); but to it she adds reams of new information drawn from her own original archival research, including revelatory passages from Humboldt himself that have never before appeared in English. Even the most experienced Humboldt scholars will find surprises on every page, and all will appreciate the thoroughly annotated citations in Harvey's lengthy footnotes. The volume is capped off with the exhibition catalogue, plus a "selected" bibliography that nevertheless runs for twenty-four of its elephant-folio pages. The result is arguably the finest and most extensive single volume in English on the profound and far-reaching impact on the United States by that world-renowned German scientist, explorer, diplomat, artist, writer, and all-around force of nature, Alexander von Humboldt. Suppressed after his death by authorities suspicious of his poetic prose and hostile to his prodemocratic, anti-imperial politics, Humboldt today is overshadowed by his followers—especially the most famous of them, Charles Darwin. But in his own day, Humboldt was widely recognized not only as the world's most famous living scientist, but also as one of the era's most famous human beings, the very icon of science itself, seen as a progressive and humanistic endeavor open to all. For most of the nineteenth century, he was a ubiquitous presence, a point of reference in science, politics, culture and the arts across the Americas, Eurasia, and the British Commonwealth. We live, said Emerson, in "the Age of Humboldt." [End Page 303] To unpack Emerson's statement is a tremendous project, as this book—which is literally so large and heavy that reading it is a project in itself—makes clear. Humboldt's vision is impossible to describe briefly because it embraced, literally, everything there is; as many have noted, he was perhaps the last human being in modernity who could attempt to hold all knowledge in one brain. One could call him encyclopedic, for he sought to behold the full extent of the natural world in one grand, interconnected unity: his writings ranged from the celestial sphere composed of stars...
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Feb 26, 2024
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