Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 - Softcover

Perry, Claire

9780195109375: Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195109376 ISBN 13: 9780195109375

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Since the arrival of the Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century, California has been thought of as a land of promise and opportunity. This lavishly illustrated catalog, which is to accompany a major exhibit opening in April 1999 at Stanford's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts and traveling subsequently to two other museums, presents a fascinating cultural history of an idyllic vision of California that still figures prominently in the American imagination. Brought together in one show for the first time, this combination of art is unique in its range from high art to popular representations. Currier and Ives lithographs and the work of early European cartographers are juxtaposed with photographs by Carleton E. Watkins, Arnold Genthe, and Eadweard Muybridge, and paintings by Albert Bierstadt, James Walker, and William Hahn, among others. With one hundred and fifty plates--sixty in full color--Pacific Arcadia illuminates the imagery of the California Dream.
Perry investigates how and why this vision of a Pacific paradise was developed and marketed to the public, taking as her subject the images produced by early visitors and residents confronted by the peculiarities of California's landscape, the abundance of its natural resources, and the omnipresence of the vast Pacific. Using paintings, drawings, maps, photographs, newspaper and book illustrations, and printed ephemera dating from the seventeenth century to 1915, Pacific Arcadia examines the ways these images represented California as a place where economic bliss could be attained in a spectacular natural setting.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

Claire Perry is curator of American art at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. She specializes in the cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

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