Exhibiting the West at the Paris Exposition of 1867: Towards a New American Aesthetic Identity?

Abstract

The Exposition Universelle of 1867 was the second of its kind to be held in Paris and was the largest to date. In 1867 the French Second Empire’s “social” doctrine staged industry and labor not only as economic values but as cultural facts, envisioned in socio-ethnographic terms if not as forms of spectacle. The United States was only a second-tier player; however, for the U.S. organizers the Paris Exposition was a crucial opportunity for the country as it just emerged from the Civil War and entered Reconstruction. This paper seeks to identify aesthetic concerns and, more generally, an ambition to seduce the gaze of French and international viewers through the general organization and specific displays of the American exhibition, concentrating on exhibits offered by the Western states and territories. Images and objects from this region—particularly between the Rocky Mountains and California—played a significant, if perhaps unexpected, role in shaping a new aesthetic identity that potentially extended to the entire US exhibition. The display of Western photographs inaugurated a trend that pushed geographical imageries, especially of so-called new lands, into greater visibility. The Paris Exposition of 1867 seems to have been a pivotal moment in the use of geographical imageries, and their ability to link economic and aesthetic values. In the context of this Exposition western photography, natural specimens and material culture of the post-Civil War era contributed to renovating the French and European view of America—substituting specific objects and pictures for an abstract idea and creating, for the first time perhaps, a strong aesthetic appeal for American pictures that were no longer the cliches understood by the phrase “American images.”