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‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.