Back in March of this year, just as the world as we know it came to a screeching halt, I brought word to you all about the then all-set-to-open Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the remarkable book of the same name by Eleanor Jones Harvey that was published by Princeton University Press to accompany it. Needless to note – it didn’t open due to public health restrictions.
When Maren Meinhardt’s “A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things; the Life of Alexander von Humboldt” was published in early 2018 by Hurst Publishers in London, it received quick and widespread praise from both literary as well as scientific reviewers. Unfortunately, as is the case with all-too-many excellent non-fiction works published in Great Britain these days, it never made its way across the Atlantic.
On 20 March 2020, a new grand exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture” was scheduled to open. It was to be the “first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903.
Needless to note, it didn’t open.
After completing my reading of Andrea Wulf‘s award-winning – and justly so – The Invention of Nature; Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, I not surprisingly found myself wanting to take up some of the works of von Humboldt himself. Unfortunately, as my French is very rusty from decades of neglect and my German all but non-existent […]