Vanishing Paradise

Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27173-9
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 184 mm x 261 mm, Gewicht: 1013 g

In the late nineteenth century Tahiti embodied Western ideas of an earthly Paradise, a primitive utopia distant geographically and culturally from the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque. Stimulated by fin de siècle longings for the exotic, a few adventurous artists sought out this Eden on the South Seas—but what they found did not always live up to the Eden of their imagination. Bringing three of these figures together in comparative perspective for the first time, Vanishing Paradise offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the nostalgic exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Drawing on archives throughout Europe, America, and the South Pacific, Childs explores how these artists, lured by romantic ideas about travel and exploration, wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Childs, Elizabeth C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Gemälde
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 19. Jahrhundert

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Preface: Regarding Tahiti

1. Histories of an Island and an Idea: From Tahiti to New Cythera

2. Garden of Eden to Dying Paradise: The Foundational Myths of Tahiti

3. Polynesia in Paris: Paul Gauguin in Search of the Exotic at the Exposition Universelle of 1889

4. The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography

5. Henry Adams, Indolence, and Ethnic Tourism in Tahiti

6. John La Farge and the Sensuousness of Regret

7. Against Vanishing

Notes

Glossary of Tahitian Terms

Selected Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Elizabeth C. Childs is Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University.