an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

by Cesar Aira

  César Aira

  AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

  Preface by ROBERTO BOLANO

  Translated from the Spanish by CHRIS ANDREWS

  A New Directions Paperbook Original

  Copyright © 2000 by César Aira

  Translation copyright © 2006 by Chris Andrews

  Originally published by BeatrizViterbo Editora, Argentina, as Un episo- dio en la vida del pintor Viajero, in 2000; published by arrangement with the Michael Gaeb Literary Agency, Berlin.

  The preface, "The Incredible César Aira" (El incretble César Aira) by Roberto Bolano, was originally published in Entre paréntesis in 2004 by Editorial Anagrama; © Heirs of Roberto Bolano, 2004.

  Aira, César, 1949-

  Preface

  The Incredible César Aira by Roberto Bolano

  If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira, an Argentinean from a town in the province of Buenos Aires called Coronel Pringles, which must, I suppose, be a real place, although it could well have been imagined by its most eminent son, who has given us superlatively lucid portraits of the Mother (a verbal mystery) and the Father (a geometrical certitude), and whose position in contemporary Hispanic literature is equal in complexity to that of Macedonio Fernandez at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Let me start by saying that Aira has written one of the five best stories I can remember. The story, included in Juan Forns anthology Buenos Aires, is entitled "Cecil Taylor." He is also the author of four memorable novels: How I Became a Nun, in which he recounts his childhood; Ema, The Captive, in which he recounts the opulence of the pampas Indians; The Literature Conference, in which he recounts an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes; and The Crying, in which he recounts a sort of epiphany or bout of insomnia.

  Naturally those are not the only novels he has written. I am told that Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas.

  Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.

  AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

  WESTERN ART can boast few documentary painters of true distinction. Of those whose lives and work we know in detail, the finest was Rugendas, who made two visits to Argentina. The second, in 1847, gave him an opportunity to record the landscapes and physical types of the Rio de la Plata—in such abundance that an estimated two hundred paintings remained in the hands of local collectors—and to refute his friend and admirer Humboldt, or rather a simplistic interpretation of Humboldt's theory, according to which the painter's talent should have been exercised solely in the more topographically and botanically exuberant regions of the New World. But the refutation had in fact been foreshadowed ten years earlier, during Rugendas's brief and dramatic first visit, which was cut short by a strange episode that would mark a turning point in his life.

  Johann Moritz Rugendas was born in the imperial city of Augsburg on the 29th of March 1802. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all well-known genre painters; one of his ancestors, Georg Philip Rugendas, was famous for his battle scenes. The Rugendas family (although Flemish in origin) had emigrated from Catalonia in 1608 and settled in Augsburg, hoping to find a social environment more hospitable to its Protestant faith. The first German Rugendas was a master clock-maker; all the rest were painters. Johan Moritz confirmed his vocation at the age of four. A gifted draughtsman, he was an outstanding student at the studio of Albrecht Adam and then at the Munich Art Academy. When he was nineteen, an opportunity arose to join the expedition to America led by Baron Langsdorff and financed by the Czar of Russia. His mission was one that, a hundred years later, would have fallen to a photographer: to keep a graphic record of all the discoveries they would make and the landscapes through which they would pass.

  At this point, to get a clearer idea of the work upon which the young artist was embarking, it is necessary to go back in time. It was Johan Moritz's great-grandfather, Georg Philip Rugendas (1666-1742) who founded the dynasty of painters. And he did so as a result of losing his right hand as a young man. The mutilation rendered him unfit for the family trade of clock-making, in which he had been trained since childhood. He had to learn to use his left hand, and to manipulate pencil and brush. He specialized in the depiction of battles, with excellent results, due to the preternatural precision of his draughtsmanship, which was due in turn to his training as a clockmaker and the use of his left hand, which, not being his spontaneous choice, obliged him to work with methodical deliberation. An exquisite contrast between the petrified intricacy of the form and the violent turmoil of the subject matter made him unique. His protector and principal patron was Charles XII of Sweden, the warrior king, whose battles he painted, following the armies from the hyperborean snows to sun-scorched Turkey. In later years he became a prosperous printer and publisher of engravings—a natural extension of his skills in military documentation. His three sons, Georg Philip, Johan and Jeremy, inherited both the business and the skills. Christian (1775-1826), the son of Georg Philip junior, was the father of our Rugendas, who brought the cycle to a close by painting the battles of another warrior king, Napoleon.

  Napoleons fall ushered in a "century of peace" in Europe, so inevitably the branch of the profession in which the family had specialized went into decline. Young Johan Moritz, an adolescent at the time of Waterloo, was obliged to execute a swift change of direction. Initially apprenticed to Adam, a battle painter, he began taking classes in nature painting at the Munich Academy. The "nature" favored by buyers of paintings and prints was exotic and remote, so he would have to follow his artistic calling abroad, and the direction his travels would take was soon determined by the opportunity to participate in the voyage mentioned above. On the threshold of his twentieth year, the world that opened before him was roughly mapped out yet still unexplored, much as it was, at around the same time, for the young Charles Darwin. The German painter's Fitzroy was Baron Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, who, during the crossing of the Atlantic turned out to be so "obdurate and hare-brained" that when the boat arrived in Brazil, Rugendas parted company with the expedition, and was replaced by another talented documentary painter, Taunay. By this decision he spared himself a good deal of grief, for the voyage was ill-starred: Taunay drowned in the Guaporé River and in the middle of the jungle Langsdorff lost what few wits he had. Rugendas, meanwhile, after four years of travel and work in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gérais, Mato Grosso, Espiritu Santo and Bahia, returned to Europe and published an exquisite illustrated book entitled A Picturesque Voyage through Brazil (the text was written by Victor Aimé Huber using the painter's notes), which made him famous and put him in touch with the eminent naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he was to collaborate on a number of publications.

  Rugendas's second and final voyage to America lasted seventeen years, from 1831 to 1847. His industrious journeying took him to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil again and Argentina, and resulted in hundreds, indeed t
housands of paintings. (An incomplete catalogue, including oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, numbers 3353 works.)

  Although the Mexican phase is the best represented, and tropical jungles and mountain scenes constitute his most characteristic subject matter, the secret aim of this long voyage, which consumed his youth, was Argentina: the mysterious emptiness to be found on the endless plains at a point equidistant from the horizons. Only there, he thought, would he be able to discover the other side of his art ... This dangerous illusion pursued him throughout his life. Twice he crossed the threshold: in 1837, he came over the Andes from Chile, and in 1847, he approached from the east, via the Rio de la Plata. The second expedition was the more productive, but did not take him beyond the environs of Buenos Aires; on his first journey, however, he ventured towards the dreamed-of center and in fact reached it momentarily, although, as we shall see, the price he had to pay was exorbitant.

  Rugendas was a genre painter. His genre was the physiognomy of nature, based on a procedure invented by Humboldt. The great naturalist was the father of a discipline that virtually died with him: Erdtheorie or La Physique du monde, a kind of artistic geography, an aesthetic understanding of the world, a science of landscape. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an all-embracing scholar, perhaps the last of his kind: his aim was to apprehend the world in its totality; and the way to do this, he believed, in conformity with a long tradition, was through vision. Yet his approach was new in that, rather than isolating images and treating them as "emblems" of knowledge, his aim was to accumulate and coordinate them within a broad framework, for which landscape provided the model. The artistic geographer had to capture the "physiognomy" of the landscape (Humboldt had borrowed this concept from Lavater) by picking out its characteristic "physiognomic" traits, which his scholarly studies in natural science would enable him to recognize. The precise arrangement of physiognomic elements in the picture would speak volumes to the observer's sensibility, conveying information not in the form of isolated features but features systematically interrelated so as to be intuitively grasped: climate, history, customs, economy, race, fauna, flora, rainfall, prevailing winds ... The key to it all was "natural growth," which is why the vegetable element occupied the foreground, and why, in search of physiognomic landscapes, Humboldt went to the tropics, which were incomparably superior to Europe in terms of plant variety and rates of growth. He lived for many years in tropical regions of Asia and America, and encouraged the artists who had adopted his approach to do likewise. Thus he established a circuit, stimulating curiosity in Europe about regions that were still little known and creating a market for the works of the traveling painters.

  Humboldt had the highest admiration for the young Rugendas, whom he dubbed the "founding father of the art of pictorial presentation of the physiognomy of nature", a description that could well have applied to himself. He played an advisory role in the painter's second great voyage, and the only point on which they disagreed was the decision to include Argentina in the itinerary. Humboldt did not want his disciple to waste his efforts south of the tropical zone, and in his letters he was generous with recommendations such as the following: "Do not squander your talent, which is suited above all to the depiction of that which is truly exceptional in landscape, such as snowy mountain peaks, bamboo, tropical jungle flora, groups composed of a single plant species at different ages; filiceae, lataniae, feathery-fronded palms, bamboo, cylindrical cactuses, red-flowered mimosas, the inga tree with its long branches and broad leaves, shrub-sized malvaceous plants with digitate leaves, particularly the Mexican hand plant (Cheirantodendron) in Toluca; the famous ahuehuete of Atlisco (the thousand-year-old Cupressus disticha) in the environs of Mexico City; the species of orchids that flower beautifully on the rounded, moss-covered protuberances of tree-trunks, surrounded in turn by mossy bulbs of dendrobium; the forms of fallen mahogany branches covered with orchids, banisteriae and climbing plants; gramineous species from the bamboo family reaching heights of twenty to thirty feet, bignoniaceae and the varieties of Foliis distichis; studies of pothos and dracontium; a trunk of Crescentia cujete laden with calabashes; a flowering Teobroma cacao with flowers springing up from the roots; the external roots of Cupressus disticha, up to four feet tall, shaped like stakes or planks; studies of a rock covered with fucus; blue water lilies in water; guastavia (pirigara) and flowering lecitis; a tropical jungle viewed from a vantage point high on a mountain, showing only the broad crowns of flowering trees, from which the bare trunks of the palms rise like a colonnade, another jungle on top of the jungle; the differing material physiognomies of pisang and heliconium ..."

  The excess of primary forms required to characterize a landscape could only be found in the tropics. In so far as vegetation was concerned, Humboldt had reduced these forms to nineteen: nineteen physiognomic types that had nothing to do with Linnean classification, which is based on the abstraction and isolation of minimal differences. The Humboldtian naturalist was not a botanist but a landscape artist sensitive to the processes of growth operative in all forms of life. This system provided the basis for the "genre" of painting in which Rugendas specialized.

  After a brief stay in Haiti, Rugendas spent three years in Mexico, from 1831 to 1834. Then he went to Chile, where he was to live for eight years, with the exception of his truncated voyage to Argentina, which lasted roughly five months. The original aim had been to travel right across the country to Buenos Aires, and from there to head north to Tucumân, Bolivia and so on. But it was not to be.

  He set out at the end of December 1837 from San Felipe de Aconcagua (Chile), accompanied by the German painter Robert Krause, with a small team of horses and mules and two Chilean guides. The plan was to take advantage of the fine summer weather to cross the picturesque passes of the Cordillera at a leisurely pace, stopping to take notes and paint whenever an interesting subject presented itself. And that was what they did.

  In a few days—not counting the many spent painting—they were well into the Cordillera. When it rained they could at least make headway, with their papers carefully rolled up in waxed cloth. It was not really rain so much as a benign drizzle, enveloping the landscape in gentle tides of humidity all afternoon. The clouds came down so low they almost landed, but the slightest breeze would whisk them away ... and produce others from bewildering corridors which seemed to give the sky access to the center of the earth. In the midst of these magical alternations, the artists were briefly granted dreamlike visions, each more sweeping than the last. Although their journey traced a zigzag on the map, they were heading straight as an arrow towards openness. Each day was larger and more distant. As the mountains took on weight, the air became lighter and more changeable in its meteoric content, a sheer optics of superposed heights and depths.

  They kept barometric records; they estimated wind speed with a sock of light cloth and used two glass capillary tubes containing liquid graphite as an altimeter. The pink-tinted mercury of their thermometer, suspended with bells from a tall pole, preceded them like Diogenes' daylight lamp. The regular hoof-beats of the horses and mules made a distant-seeming sound; though barely audible, it too was a part of the universal pattern of echoes.

  Suddenly, at midnight, explosions, rockets, flares, resonating on and on among the immensities of rock and bringing quick splashes of vivid color to those vast austerities: it was the start of 1838, and the two Germans had brought a provision of fireworks for their own private celebration. They opened a bottle of French wine and drank to the new year with the guides. After which they lay down to sleep under the starry sky, waiting for the moon, which emerged in due course from behind the silhouette of a phosphorescent peak, putting a stop to their drowsy listing of resolutions and launching them into true sleep.

  Rugendas and Krause got on well and had plenty to talk about, although both were rather quiet. They had traveled together in Chile a number of times, always in perfect harmony. The only thing that secretly bothered Rugendas was the irremediable med
iocrity of Krause's painting, which he was not able to praise in all sincerity, as he would have liked. He tried telling himself that genre painting did not require talent, since it was all a matter of following the procedure, but it was no use: the pictures were worthless. He could, however, appreciate his friend's technical accomplishment and above all his good nature. Krause was very young and still had time to choose another path in life. Meanwhile he could enjoy these excursions; they would certainly do him no harm. Krause, for his part, was in awe of Rugendas, and the pleasure they took in each other's company was due in no small measure to the disciple's devotion. The difference in age and talent was not obvious, because Rugendas, at thirty-five, was timid, effeminate and gawky as an adolescent, while Krause's aplomb, aristocratic manners and considerate nature narrowed the gap.

  On the fifteenth day they crossed the watershed and began the descent, advancing more rapidly. There was a risk of the mountains becoming a habit, as they obviously were for the guides, who charged by the day. The Germans would be protected against this danger by the exercise of their art, but only in the long term; in the short term, as they acquainted themselves with the surroundings and their representation, the effect was reversed. Riding on slowly or stopping to rest, they passed the time discussing questions of a technical nature. Each novel sight set their tongues in motion as they sought to account for the difference. It should be remembered that the bulk of the work they were doing was preliminary: sketches, notes, jottings. In their papers, drawing and writing were blended; the exploitation of these data in paintings and engravings was reserved for a later stage. Engravings were the key to circulation, and their potentially infinite reproduction had to be considered in detail. The cycle was completed by surrounding the engravings with a text and inserting them into a book.