Page 162 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gottfried Lindauer: ‘Maori at Home’ portraits (exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition) 1886.
A Czech-born New Zealander, Lindauer had studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, and visiting New Zealand in 1874, became entranced with the still thriving Maori native community. He made this study of the ‘Maori at Home’ his life’s work, completed over 120 paintings of individuals, many on commission. He was not only a talented ethnographical artist, but experimented with the use of photography, both as visual reference and in epidiascope projection lectures, and tracing, and in direct painting upon enlarged photographic prints. These innate talents and experiments in technique resulted in an almost ‘photo-realistic’ precision, further amplified by his painterly brushwork. Interestingly, Lindauer painted individuals as they wanted to be portrayed - ie sometimes wanting to display their cultural attachment to Western culture by wearing watches, formal European clothes, etc, but still displaying their Maori heritage in the ornate tattoos (t moko - facial tattoos). These are remarkable images and an important addition to the Orientalist fashion in European art in the second- half of the 19th century. This subject matter was revisited by Frances Hodgkins and others in the early 20th century, and was preceded by the American Indian portrait paintings of George Catlin in the 1830s.
The ethnographical painters are also evidence of the increasing ‘globalisation’ of the world as successive European empires claimed territorial influence right around the world, and as photography, steamship travel and international postal and telecommunications services made the world more accessible.
This kind of painting prefigures the large, national and international photographic projects like Albert Kahn’s Planetary Archive (1908-1931) - colour photographs and film of most of the World’s peoples - and Edward Sherriff Curtiss’ The North American Indian (from 1903).