Paris Exposition Research Articles

Republics, Revolutions and Racialisation: The South African Republic at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle

Republics, Revolutions and Racialisation: The South African Republic at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893

A lively, informative and meticulously researched empirical consideration of the American taste for nineteenth-century French art in the Gilded Age, Leanne M. Zalewski’s volume is a worthy and welcome contribution to the body of existing scholarship on the topic. Focusing on the post-Civil War period, the volume examines the American enthusiasm for contemporary French academic painting and the creation of a commercial and museal infrastructure that allowed the market for it to flourish. A fundamental question underpinning the book is that of the philanthropic endeavours of the collectors under scrutiny, together with their role and that of their collections in the formation of the institutions that have shaped New York’s cultural landscape. One of the many strengths of the volume lies in its clear chronological chapter structure, which expertly traces the rise of the taste for French academic art and its ultimate demise in favour of Impressionist works. The introductory chapter introduces the key research questions and positions the study within the body of existing research. Taking as a starting point the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, the second chapter analyses the critical and often scathing reception of American art, and the overall perceived failure of the American contribution to the exhibition. The episode was a catalyst for the American taste for French Salon paintings; the chapter sheds intelligent light on its pivotal importance in the changing commercial fortunes of French contemporary paintings and the voracious appetite of outre-Atlantique collectors for acquiring them. The third chapter offers an examination of the commercial networks of exchange that underpinned purchases, and the dealers who facilitated such transactions. While the chapter adequately considers key auction sales and the impact of taxation on the fortunes of French academic art in America, the reader is nevertheless left wanting to know more about the relationships between dealers and artists, a topic that is almost entirely skimmed over.

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Sara Rutkowski To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. By Elizabeth McHenry. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 295. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1451-5; cloth, $104.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1539-4.) Each of the four chapters of Elizabeth McHenry’s new book, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship, offers a luminous venture into a little-known corner of African American literary history at the turn of the twentieth century. In her first chapter, McHenry introduces readers to a body of history and criticism she calls “racial school books”—works sold by subscription that charted racial history and effectively provided an alternative curriculum in classrooms for Black students in the Midwest and the South. McHenry delves into how volumes like William Krogman and Henry Kletzing’s Progress of a Race (Atlanta, 1896), which have long been excluded from consideration as “literature,” became sites of “the advancement of literacy and literary education” (p. 15). The next chapter focuses on the proliferation of bibliographies that cataloged Black print culture. As McHenry explains, these lists became a way of [End Page 372] establishing parameters of and giving “purpose and legitimacy to Black literature” (p. 79). Daniel Murray’s bibliographies for the 1900 Paris Exposition and the bibliographies W. E. B. Du Bois published in the early years of the twentieth century “have much to tell us about how the subjects of Blackness were being mapped, aesthetically imagined, and politically mobilized” (p. 128). McHenry then shifts to T. Thomas Fortune, the writer largely responsible for Booker T. Washington’s literary career. She describes Fortune’s efforts to make Washington “literary”—and by extension to give authority to Black literary production (p. 131). But Fortune sacrificed his own writerly ambitions, and his fiction fared poorly in the literary marketplace while he constructed Washington’s authorship. Finally, McHenry explores the life and work of Mary Church Terrell, a notable journalist and activist whose aspirations as a fiction writer were met with nothing but letters of rejection from white publishers. Yet as McHenry maintains, Terrell’s continued insistence on submitting her short stories in the face of certain refusal, as well as her careful archiving of her correspondence with publishers, formed part of “a furious and systematic assault on a segment of a publishing institution intent on denying the complexity of racial identity” (p. 234). On its surface then, To Make Negro Literature is a composite of long essays linked by somewhat hidden subjects that occupy the same historical period, a period that McHenry argues has been largely ignored or conveniently treated as an extension of Reconstruction or a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. But McHenry’s goal in this volume is not about—or not simply about— correcting this critical oversight and isolating a new period of Black literary history. Instead, she sets her sights on something much larger: reframing how scholars perform literary studies. By expanding critical attention to texts that have been dismissed as insufficiently literary, to devalued readerships, to Black print culture, and to the labors of writers who failed to find success, McHenry is attempting to “rejigger both our understanding of turn-of-the-century African American literary culture and our conception of the appropriate objects of African Americanist literary inquiry” (p. 11). Indeed, the concept of failure is the thread that runs through these chapters, as McHenry invites us to consider how failure—in contrast to the accomplishments of widely studied writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt—operates as a “rich site of theorization” (p. 5). Drawing on concepts from queer studies, she shows how failing can be conceived as “a rejection of what is” if we look at how Black literary practitioners found ways to “audaciously reject and refuse the place assigned to them and the disrespect shown to their intellectual lives as segregation and disenfranchisement were formalized and codified” (p. 6). What McHenry has done is valuable, then, not only for the wealth of material she has unearthed, but also for...

The Politics of Curating Japonisme

Abstract This article studies the Paris exposition Japonismes 2018, organized by the Japanese government to introduce the European public to the profundity of Japanese culture. It examines the organizational deliberations leading up to the exposition; the curation of individual exhibits held within its ambit; and the cultural politics of ‘Japan expositions’ that began with Japonismes and continue to this day. It argues that the organizers and exhibits in Japonismes make political use of the trope of a timeless, mystical, and animistic Japanese sense of beauty that supposedly unites prehistoric pottery and contemporary comics and animation. This Japanese aesthetic vision claims to provide an alternative to Western norms, thereby promising to resolve contemporary problems, such as anthropocentrism, by influencing Western aesthetics as it had in the late nineteenth century. Japonismes exemplifies how Japanese soft power diplomacy can employ Western tropes about Japan, such as Japonisme, for its economic and nation-branding efforts.

Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton

Reviewed by: Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton Emily C. Burns Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. xix, 168 pp. $49.95 (paper). Histories built on comparative case studies often lead to new discoveries by focusing on examples that are both parallel and divergent. This is the model undergirding art historian Elizabeth Sutton's comparative study of Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora and the author's great-grandmother Karen Thronson, a Norwegian immigrant to the Midwest. Pairing these two figures' stories and the spaces of subjugation and assimilation that operated for both Native nations and Scandinavian immigrant communities in the [End Page 197] Midwest allows readers to consider the power of objects to engage with place, identity, culture, gender, and memory. Sutton argues that these artists, contemporaries who never met, both engaged in community-building through art production to, in Sutton's words, "connect with place and validate self and group identity" (1). The act of creating in a variety of media—and in particular engaging with long-standing practices in their respective communities—helped these individuals to navigate their identities in the context of expected assimilation. There is much to recommend in this discussion, that centers on female makers and challenges art history's traditional hierarchies that tend to devalue craft. Sutton's focus on minoritized experience recasts ongoing narratives of settler colonialism and cultural subjugation. The text also takes seriously the possibilities of "visual coding" (24, 56) as a strategy that Thronson and De Cora employed to speak to U.S. and non-U.S. audiences simultaneously. This question—what modes of cultural expression could be non-threatening to dominant culture—offers the book's key investigation of artistic agency and messaging. The text also highlights the role of organizations and publication outlets for communicating ideas of identity. The study, however, leaves some important questions tantalizingly unanswered. There is a promising synergy between the presentation of handicraft from Scandinavia and Native American design in ladies' magazine cultures (83), but this is not probed further. The crucial scholarship by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson on De Cora's navigations of modern and Native identities is listed in the bibliography but is not cited or directly engaged in the content of the book, although the author does come to similar conclusions about how De Cora strategically sought to build a compatibly Native American and modern artistic practice. A dialogue with Hutchinson's conclusions on this topic would have also enabled greater clarity of Sutton's contributions, especially in her original research of design projects by De Cora's female students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the ways that De Cora encouraged her students to develop individual expression via a larger understanding of Native American art practices in the early twentieth century (108–116). I also would have appreciated a citation for her use of Lakota interpretations of color in the Carlisle student work (112) as well as some discussion of De Cora's painting in the Native American boarding school exhibition at the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900 when her participation in several other World's Fair displays is noted (57). Tonalism as an aesthetic practice, which De Cora employed, is never really defined or productively [End Page 198] engaged as an aesthetic (48, 65), which makes it difficult to trace the artists' adaptation of it. The project might have benefited from further integration of the main figures. Each chapter oscillates between the two subjects, and the brief conclusion does not fully show how they are complements or foils for each other. Do we really see either figure more clearly in this comparison? An extended article focusing on key similarities, such as immigration and dispossession, might have been more effective as a comparative study. Indeed, while the artists share a gender identity and the use of art to connect with their respective communities, certainly the experiences of Norwegian immigrant women and Native American women significantly diverge in...

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris, by Jennifer Walker

<i>Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris</i>, by Jennifer Walker

International Exhibitions, Literary Capitalism, and the Emergence of Comparative Literature

Abstract The invention of international fairs in the 19th century revolutionized both nationalism and modern thinking on global relationships since they showcased but also contested and negotiated national, imperial, and global identities. From the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace to the 1900 Paris Exposition, the international fairs / expositions universelles were landmarks of histoire croisée of nationalism, global thinking, and capitalism. Even though they seem to be showcasing industrial progress, they also created a completely new frame for the self-fashioning, vindication, and negotiation of national arts and literatures, interpreted in a global setting and in capitalist terms. I propose to explore the pattern and experience of the 19th-century international fair / exposition universelle as an important frame for the emerging modern transnational literary scene, fueling major debates on the nature of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and capitalism.

Gauging Film History: An Exquisite Corpse

Gauging Film History:An Exquisite Corpse Ina Archer (bio), Dino Everett (bio), Marsha Gordon (bio), and Martin Louis Johnson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Collage of 3 mm, 8 mm, 8.75 mm, 9.5 mm, 16 mm, 17.5 mm, 22 mm, 35 mm, 65 mm, and 70 mm. Arranged and photographed by Dino Everett, HMH Foundation Archivist, University of Southern California. [End Page 126] If the history of film is a history of creative expression and experimentation, it is also a history of technical innovations, standards, and practices. Of these, the width, or gauge, of film is one of the most critical, if often neglected. While film gauges were—by and large, and with important exceptions—standardized very early in an effort to make film an interoperable, international technology, producers and equipment manufacturers continued to experiment with film gauge, making films wider and narrower to achieve various exhibition-related objectives. Over time, film gauges became associated with modes of display, sites of exhibition, and specific uses of the medium. Unlike other film histories, the history of film gauges is not a story of growth from small to large, low to high, or local to global. Instead, film gauge confounds these narratives, offering us a history of dead and loose ends. What follows is a series of lilliputian lamentations, tiny tributes, half-pint histories, elfin elegies, mini manifestoes, and petit poems on the history of film gauges, starting with the widest gauge (125 mm) and ending with the smallest (3 mm). It was produced in the Surrealist spirit of an Exquisite Corpse: our team met once on Zoom to establish and discuss the rules that would guide our respective entries, which we did not share with each other until the entire piece was drafted in our separate corners. We assigned each participant a set of gauges on a 1-2-3-4 basis, rotating writers as we went from the widest to the narrowest, with each entry written to the precise word count for the gauge. For some entries (17.5 mm, 9.5 mm) this meant writing to the half-word. We agreed that we could be expansive in our entries but that we would discuss no gauge other than the one assigned. We did not see each other's contributions before our second and final meeting, when we revealed our pieces all at once through the simultaneous magic of a Google doc and a spirited recitation in the round. 125 Cinema is ephemeral, all light and shadows, darkened rooms and fixed gazes. Film is tactical, plastic, and fragile. When we hold film up to the light, our fingers are separated by its width, or gauge, allowing us to see the frame, unobstructed. While images can be made smaller or larger through lenses and throws, the gauge remains constant. Or does it? What is the history of the gauge, that standard that is not as standard as we assume? What do we make of the edge cases of something defined by its edges? Edges such as 125 mm, almost 5 inches, a gauge first patented by Herman Schlicker in 1914, designed to contain as many images as possible, some 1,664 on a roll of safety film. [End Page 127] 75 The 75 mm gauge was developed by the Lumière brothers for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The idea was to create a larger format in order to provide greater clarity when it was projected on a larger screen. The camera was built and ten negatives were shot; however, the projector was never completed. There was a typo in the Brian Coe book of Movie Photography that suggested Todd-AO prints were 75 mm, but that is false. 70 I'm among the earliest and widest to gaze at the cityscape. I'm the grandest and in my grandeur I grew from no perfs to 4, epically accommodating the coming of sound. You can positively BLOW me up to twice my negative size because I'm a Mad Mad Mad Mad format. Superlative plus high, wide, and handsome in my mid 50s—monikered Todd-AO, Ultra, Super, Panavision, and IMAX in my 70s...

Decolonizing the Color-Line: A Topological Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's Infographics for the 1900 Paris Exposition

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

Techniques of Justice: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race

AbstractThis essay responds to recent calls for a closer examination of visualizations of race in multi-ethnic literature by revisiting the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in this area: particularly, the infographics he created for the 1900 Paris Exposition and the covers he commissioned for The Crisis during his editorship of that journal. Utilizing an approach derived from Foucault’s theories of panopticism, we consider how Du Bois engaged contemporary visual stereotypes of Blackness. First, Du Bois engaged the analytic mode of panopticism in order to break down existing stereotypes of black communities and reveal their diversity and similarities to white communities. Then, Du Bois engaged the synoptic mode to create new, elegant, and abstract visual stereotypes of black achievement and excellence. Our analysis provides valuable context to previous critiques of Du Bois’s elitism by demonstrating it to be—in the visual realm at least—an inevitable consequence of attempting to replace one panoptic stereotype with another: panopticism tends to support rather than subvert hegemony. Notwithstanding, Du Bois’s infographics, with their analytic interventions and visual abstractions, point to techniques for intervening in the visualization of race that bear further investigation in his wider body of scientific and editorial work.

Review: Angkor Wat: A Transcultural History of Heritage

Review: <i>Angkor Wat: A Transcultural History of Heritage</i>

Cinema as a form of composition

Cinema as a form of composition

‘Un'arte ancora in embrione’: international expositions, empire, and the evolution of Fascist architectural design

This article reconsiders the development of Fascist architecture throughout the late interwar period. It pays especial attention to the structures erected for the most significant international expositions held, or planned to be held, between 1933 and 1942, in order to identify significant trends in Party-sponsored design. It argues that the ‘dynamism’ of Fascist design was a consequence of the regime's preference for an increasingly imperial tone which developed in direct proportion to its increasingly imperial identity. It points to Piacentini and Pagano's Italian Pavilion built for the 1937 Paris Exposition, the first national pavilion constructed following the May 1936 proclamation of empire, as a significant flashpoint in the tension between Fascist interpretations of modern and classical design. This article concludes that the often-overlooked world's fair buildings can be viewed as crystalline distillations of the stylistic experimentation which defined the broader Fascist building programme both in Italy and abroad.

Appropriating Japonisme at the 1900 Exposition: Sada Yacco, Loie Fuller, and the ‘Geishas’ of Le Panorama du Tour du Monde

ABSTRACT Japanese exhibits filled the 1900 Paris Exposition, from the official pavilion at the Trocadéro to ‘geishas' performing in the Panorama du Tour du Monde. The highlight for French reporters, however, was actress Sada Yacco's performances at the Théâtre Loïe Fuller on the rue de Paris. The former geisha joined American Fuller in creating original spectacles that captivated audiences not as Japanese ‘ethnography', as in other exhibits, but as ‘art’. This article draws attention to the rhetorical and commercial strategies used by these women to attract audiences to their own unique artistic performances of Japonisme, Western creations inspired by Japanese traditions.

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the PosthumousAntebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth CenturyNarratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the PosthumousAntebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth CenturyNarratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life

Blacksmithing Art in the Eastern Ukraine as a Component Part of Ukrainian Cultural Process

The development of art and craft of blacksmithing in the Eastern region of Ukraine, specifically in Poltava, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk oblasts has been analysed. The study of the blacksmithing in Donetsk city and Donetsk oblast was limited to the second half of the 19th century and up to the 2014. The progress of blacksmithing at the temporarily occupied and uncontrolled territories of Ukraine has not been researched by the author. The article focuses on the unique piece blacksmithing art of the national and global scale — Mertsalov palm tree. In 1900 Mertsalov palm tree was displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition in the pavilion of the coal society. In 1999 the first copy of the Mertsalov palm tree was mounted in Donetsk. This latter palm tree was forged by the Donetsk-based smith Serhiy Kaspruk along with his son Oleh. Mertsalov palm tree became the first contemporary art piece turning the public attention not only to the artwork itself, but to the producing enterprise as well. From the contemporary marketing viewpoint the forged palm tree on display was an event of unprecedented global scope. Mertsalov palm tree was a starting point for the development of blacksmithing art in the Eastern Ukraine that survived the decay during the harsh 20th century and was revived during the early 1980s.

“The Most Passionate of All”

Known primarily as a jeweler in the vanguard of Art nouveau and an important collector of the Impressionists, Henri Vever (1854-1942), as his private diaries make clear, was also a foremost connoisseur of Japanese art in fin-de-siècle France, “the most passionate of all,” to Edmond de Goncourt. Well-connected to networks of dealers, museum officials, publications, and sites of sociability such as the dîners japonais, Vever figures among the most prominent members of a second wave of Parisian enthusiasts of Japanese art, active from approximately 1880 to 1900. Under the tutelage of the Japanese art dealers Hayashi Tadamasa and Siegfried Bing and the fine art printer Charles Gillot, Vever constituted a renowned collection of not only Japanese prints but also other art objects previously disregarded by collectors. Vever’s multiple and intersecting identities as luxury craft producer, leading member of professional associations, art historian and critic, collector, and Republican mayor placed him at the forefront of efforts to legitimate the collection and appreciation of Japanese art in France. His diaries also underscore the connections between the worlds of Japanese and Impressionist art collectors, and between proponents of japonisme and Art nouveau. Further, they highlight the importance of the 1900 Paris Exposition universelle as a triumphant moment for japonisme in France, just as they signal the shift on the part of some japonisants, at the same time, from Japanese art towards the decorative arts of the Islamic world.

Animating Antiquity in the Vision animée

AbstractIn 1900, the soprano Jeanne Hatto recorded a scene from Gluck's 1779 opera Iphigénie en Tauride for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, an exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle that screened silent films manually synchronised with cylinder recordings. Recently restored and digitised by the Cinémathèque Française and the Gaumont Pathé Archives, Hatto's film affords us a glimpse into the revitalising force ascribed to female performers around the turn of the century: the ability to bring ancient statues – and antiquity itself – to life through physical movement. Through their embodiment of ancient Greek figures on stage and in visions animées, prima donnas laid claim to a form of corporeal authority that had all but disappeared from the French stage over the preceding century.

Aesthetic modernisation and international comparisons: learning about drawing instruction at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with an early phase in the history of educational comparisons in which international exhibitions played a major role as spaces for comparison. It looks at the educational exhibits at the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1900, and more specifically its exhibitions on drawing instruction. By following a central Swedish actor, Hjalmar Berg, and his ambition to modernise drawing instruction in Sweden based on his impressions at the exhibition, the article argues that the exhibition was a medium with the potential to promote aesthetic modernisation. Previous research has highlighted the world’s fairs as important arenas for the international comparison of education. This article is intended to contribute to this field by also exploring what these exhibitions meant on a national level.

Gustave Eiffel's wind tunnel

The Eiffel Tower was built for the Paris Exposition of 1889. By 1903, Gustave Eiffel had become interested in the new subject of aerodynamics. In that year, he rigged up a cable from the second floor of the tower to the ground. Test objects could be dropped along the cable, and their reaction to wind resistance could be measured. Not satisfied with this system, in 1909 Eiffel built his first wind tunnel next to the tower. The location was convenient because there was a ready source of electrical power used to supply the tower's needs. By 1911, however, he had worn out his welcome and was asked by the authorities to move his installations elsewhere. He was 78 years old.