Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520271739)

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.

Author: Elizabeth C. Childs
ISBN-10: 0520271734
ISBN-13: 9780520271739
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 05/18/2013
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.21lbs
Size: 10.28h x 7.37w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2013