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Show Waren Meine Freunde. Although both of these publications were interested primarily in the historical event, they opened up new information in American and European archives to the investigation. Information continued to expand in the 1980s, as additional works sponsored by Joslyn Art Museum, including The West as Romantic Horizon and Views of a Vanishing Frontier, were published. While more information has become available because of the museum's efforts, the direction of the research remains historical. Because of this trend, with its emphasis on the primary documentation, the aquatints, as secondary documentation, began to recede further and further into the background. At the beginning of the research for this paper in 1984, then, very little art historical evaluation or critical analysis of the aquatints had been published. Three avenues for further inquiry were soon presented. First, initial comparisons of various states of the aquatints revealed numerous image changes. In many cases, these changes appeared to be more than simple technical modifications. The process of documenting the changes began with the collection of aquatints held by the University of Utah and expanded over the next five years as more collections were examined. Second, since Maximilian's published account of the expedition was essentially an early nineteenth-century travelbook , a legitimate and well-documented avenue of art historical research was available through investigation of such European travel literature. Third, the immense amount of historical and ethnological research concerning Maximilian and other nineteenth-century naturalists could not be ignored. Further research in this area showed the possibility of extracting information that might explain the reasons behind the image XI |
