An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- César Aira, Paperback

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the physiognomic totality of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 05/25/2006
Pages: 120
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.21lbs
Size: 7.12h x 4.95w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9780811216302

Review Citation(s):
Multicultural Review 12/01/2006 pg. 43
Library Journal 06/05/2006
New York Review of Books 01/13/2011 pg. 36