Description

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 siecle 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.

Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti

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Hardback by Elizabeth C. Childs

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In the late nineteenth century Tahiti embodied Western ideas of an earthly Paradise, a primitive utopia distant geographically and culturally... Read more

    Publisher: University of California Press
    Publication Date: 18/05/2013
    ISBN13: 9780520271739, 978-0520271739
    ISBN10: 0520271734

    Number of Pages: 352

    Non Fiction , Art & Photography

    Description

    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 siecle 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.

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