19th century world history
A01=Elizabeth C. Childs
american artists
american author
american painter
art
art history
artists
Author_Elizabeth C. Childs
beauty
belle epoque
Category=AGA
colonial tahiti
eden
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
european artists
exotic
exploration
french painter
french polynesia
gilded age
henry adams
history
john lafarge
literary history
modern
modernist primitivism
modernity
mythic
paintings
paradise
paul gauguin
remote island
retrospective
romantics ideas
south pacific
south seas
tahiti
tourism
travel
utopia
Product details
- ISBN 9780520271739
- Weight: 998g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
