Re-casting difference: Charles Cordier's ethnographic sculptures

Examining Cordier's nineteenth-century ethnographic busts, I argue that their contemporary exhibition must include the contexts of their creation and early display. Curators in the twenty-first century approach his works as celebrations of visual difference motivated by curiosity and artistic search for beauty. Yet Cordier showed these works in different types of venues, considering the sculptures both artistic and scientific. He worked from live models, traveling to Algeria to make busts of different racial types. Given these issues, discourses of Orientalism, anthropological racial theories, and colonial movement frame my analysis of his choice of non-French subjects, his sculptural process, and his use of multimedia and polychromy. I analyze these works looking at both historical and contemporary displays and aspects of Cordier's biography, as well as journals and travel guides