New Romantic Painting and the Image of History

For contemporary Cree artist Kent Monkman, painting offers a means to rehisoticising Indigenous life. However, rather than attempt to capture a putative authenticity, Monkman’s work questions the relationship between visual representation and historical truth, deeply complicating his own task. This complication is managed in part through the careful deployment of self-reflection, such that the images of history he composes always advertise their unstable relationship to the past and the present, questioning their own authority in the process of exposing how European artists attempted to establish their own. This exploration produces works that are highly citational, in which figures and elements from across European history and art history are juxtaposed and arranged into fantastic, anachronistic tableaus. But it is especially the works of Romantic painters that serve him as models for remodelling and settings for repopulation. Indeed, if Romantic painters such as George Catlin (1769-1872), Paul Kane (1810-71), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) flatten Indigenous people or actually evacuate them from American landscapes, Monkman does not simply reject their work but realises in it a rich potential for dialogic revision. In Monkman’s painting, Romanticism’s own historical self-consciousness finds new expression.