Since the publication of William Cronon's Changes in the Land, nature has been increasingly interpreted as a socially determined ideology rather than as a pristine, untrammeled wilderness. Claire Perry's Pacific Arcadia continues this tradition, examining how 19th-century representations of California's physical and social ecologies rehabilitated the state's sordid image from one of economic avarice and racial barbarism toward one embracing the refined cosmopolitan tastes of Victorian mass culture.
Pacific Arcadia (coinciding with an exhibition at Stanford University's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Art) amply demonstrates how images of California initially expressed the imperatives of its colonists. Spanish (and later Mexican) engravers, cartographers, and painters celebrated the potential for wealth and the benefits of "civilizing" the native inhabitants, while foreign visitors betrayed their own imperial designs by emphasizing Franciscan brutalities and Californio thriftlessness. To Anglo-Americans, swarming into the region in the 1840s, "California came to represent cultural values at odds with the ideals of hard work, community solidarity, and religious observance on which the nation was founded." In order to combat the resulting Tocquevillean excesses of Gold Rush culture, California's boosters founded an era of European-style genre painting, mission-revival architecture, orange-crate art , and scenic photography, which represented the state's environment and Spanish history in conformity with late-19th-century values of socially edifying consumption.
Perry's research is encyclopedically detailed. While she fully discusses prominent painters, such as Alfred Bierstadt and ranchero pictorialist Charles Christian Nahl, she also pays heed to the role that more mechanical art forms, such as political cartooning and stereoscopic photography, played in reinventing the Golden State's image. Vividly written and bounteously illustrated, Pacific Arcadia provides a long-needed discussion of the links between California's arts movements and the rising hegemony of America's middle class near the turn of the 20th century. --John M. Anderson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Because of the beauty and variety of its physical geography and climate, California would probably have become a region dominated by powerful mythology even without the Gold Rush, Hollywood, or oranges. The Golden State has nurtured "California dreams" for three centuries through potent images, from explorers' maps, advertisements, wilderness photography, paintings, and, of course, the movies. In this companion to an exhibit at Stanford's Cantor Center for Visual Arts, curator Perry chronicles the iconography of early California. The book, which is the first of its kind, is both breathtaking and frustrating: for example, by ending her study with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, Perry curiously (and perhaps conveniently) avoids having to consider the massive impact of the motion picture industry on the visual history of "California dreamin'." Written in accessible but at times plodding, self-conscious, and understated prose, this is nonetheless a unique contribution to the history of an immensely important region. Highly recommended for all large public and academic libraries.ADouglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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