Elizabeth Childs’s Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti is several books in one: a survey of the European encounter with Tahiti from Captain Cook to the present; a focused examination of artistic (and to a lesser extent literary) representations of the island from about 1880 to 1901 (the year Paul Gauguin left Tahiti for the Marquesas and both Henry Adams and John La Farge published accounts of their visits); a critique of colonial received ideas about an always “vanishing paradise” in the South Pacific; a focused treatment of the art of Gauguin from his arrival in Tahiti in 1891 to his departure a decade later; and a briefer account of Adams’s and La Farge’s joint visit, also in 1891.

The book’s first chapter is a summary—just eighteen pages, most of which also contain half-page, black-and-white illustrations—of the early exploration of Tahiti and emerging European stereotypes. While it is certainly true that many of the prevailing “myths” of late nineteenth-century Tahiti—including that it was an island of love with an early history of violence—were established a century earlier, Childs unfortunately reduces the complexity of the early encounter and its subsequent ideological reverberations by omitting discussion of the art associated with the Cook voyages by Joseph Banks, William Hodges, and Johann Reinhold Forster, or the narratives of Samuel Wallis, James Cook, and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. Denis Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) especially demands consideration here because it established the utopian dichotomy of nature and culture (Tahiti versus Europe) that was so important for Gauguin and other late nineteenth-century visitors. Indeed, the absence of any reading of Diderot (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau too) in this chapter or elsewhere signals a certain reluctance on Childs’s part to take seriously the Western idealization of Tahiti as a form of “romantic anti-capitalism”: a critique of capitalist modernization from a pre-capitalist, cultural perspective (the term, crucial to the literary criticism of Georg Lukács, is discussed in Michael Löwy, “Naphta or Settembrini?—Lukács and Romantic Anticapitalism,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, eds., Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989, 189–206).

The second chapter of Vanishing Paradise describes “five dominant ideas” found in European discovery narratives that shaped late nineteenth-century discourse. They are: Tahiti is a land of natural abundance; Tahitians are more fair-skinned than other Pacific peoples and not coincidentally more generous and even tempered, though sometimes also indolent; Tahitian women are sexually uninhibited or wanton; Tahiti is a land of the supernatural and the superstitious with Christianity a mere thin veneer; and, the violence of the Tahitian past, with its many warrior castes and clans, has been superseded by a pastoral arcadia. Childs does a good job describing these stereotypes, but her nod to poststructuralism appears to forbid her from fully examining their actual falsity or validity. She writes: “No single record of encounter is ‘truer’ than any other” (10). The question of living standards, for example, would have been worth addressing. Notwithstanding Gauguin’s difficulty obtaining affordable provisions, it appears true that indigenous Polynesians—with access to extended, kinship-based, trade and barter networks—could sustain themselves without having to work very hard. (Such still seemed to be the case even in 1996, when I last visited.) Childs also declines to answer the question of whether or not young Tahitian women in the nineteenth century were sexual slaves to European explorers and settlers, or were instead seeking by their liaisons to establish relations of theogamy or hypergamy, or to collect mana (power). More simply, was the European stigma against female promiscuity simply absent in pre- and post-contact Tahiti, as in some other areas in the Pacific? Childs rejects the possibility without argument, lumping Margaret Mead among the many propagators—beginning with Bougainville—of what she considers the myth that Tahitian sexuality was practiced innocently and openly (subject to few taboos) in order to satisfy basic human needs. It should also be noted here that in this chapter and elsewhere, Childs evades any definition of “myth.” Given the various uses of the term by folklorists, anthropologists, linguists, historians, and others, a brief excursus would have been clarifying.

In chapter 3, Childs turns to Gauguin’s art and career, in particular his visits and contributions to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 where Tahiti was put on display. Here the critical-theory jargon comes hard and fast and without much gloss: exoticism, Orientalism, racism, primitivism, colonialism, Other, world-as-picture (Martin Heidegger), “authentic,” and “typical” (both with quotes). Childs’s account of the fair as a kind of ethnic theme park and an embodied encyclopedia of racial and cultural difference is solid, grounded in part on her excellent use of primary sources, especially the many published guides to the Exposition. Her thorough description of the Tahitian pavilion—its crafts, tools, agricultural products, photographs, and real, living indigenes, along with the kinesthetic experiences on offer—is original and essential. Childs is no doubt correct that Gauguin’s visit to the Exposition must have been the equivalent of the proverbial kid in a candy shop: “Gauguin moved through the colonial section of the fair with an open imagination and an omnivorous eye. His interests were as eclectic as the cultures on display” (70). But Childs’s distracting censoriousness returns when she interprets—mistakenly in my view—Gauguin’s acquisition (and signing) of a wooden sculpture by an anonymous Congolese artist active at the fair as an act of cultural disrespect. Assuming the sculpture (photographed in a Russian collection in 1909) was in fact owned and signed by Gauguin and is not an early attempt at forgery, the gesture is better interpreted as an announcement of the artist’s own authenticity: “I too am a savage,” he appears to be saying. Real or ersatz, the many artifacts and ethnic pavilions at the fair enabled Gauguin to envision a Studio of the Tropics where he would be free to live, as he insensitively wrote to his wife, Mette, “in ecstasy, in peace and for art” (88).

What is lacking most in this chapter is an account of Gauguin’s actual art on display at the Exposition. Childs’s discussion of the Volpini suite is cursory, occupying only a single paragraph. In fact, these zincographs on Breton, Martiniquan, and other subjects are a major intervention in both aestheticism and exoticism and provide the best evidence there is of Gauguin’s understanding to that point of racial and ethnic difference. Moreover, the prints were consequential: many of the themes and compositions in the Volpini suite, for example Pastoral in Martinique (1889), would reappear in the following decade in the Tahitian works. In Pastoral as in Te Pape Nave Nave (1898) from a decade later, the feminine, native world is presented as one of sociability, intimacy, and gossip—from which the metropolitan artist is clearly excluded. Gauguin’s alienation from indigenous society—and by implication the insularity of settler society in general—is a major theme in all of Gauguin’s exilic art from Brittany to the Marquesas.

Chapter 4 explores “Gauguin, Primitivism and Photography,” and, in particular, the artist’s romantic and exoticist effort to recover what had been lost or destroyed by the imposition of colonial rule and the French mission civilisatrice. Childs argues that photography played a crucial mediating role in this enterprise, providing at once a veritable encyclopedia of generalized primitivist motifs, as well as specific access to a Maohi culture and history that was otherwise unavailable to him. The case is persuasively presented, and Gauguin’s possession and repeated use, for example, of photographs both from Borobudur and from the contemporary Tahitian studios of Charles Spitz and Henri Lemasson would appear to confirm it. But to argue from this that the artist thereby “sidesteps the messy contingencies . . . of contemporary Tahiti (115) is an overstatement. Many of Gauguin’s Tahitian pictures, including Te Matete (The Market) (1892) and Two Women (ca. 1901), both of which Childs discusses, to my eye bear unmistakable marks of self-conscious hybridity. Indeed, Childs posits as much when she says about the former: “The picture, despite its archaizing style, is packed with references to life in contemporary Tahiti. For example, in the detail of the two seated women exchanging confidences at right, Gauguin recalls . . . [that] the weekly market served as the center for the gossip machine that controlled the social fabric of Tahitian society” (126). Moreover, as Childs plausibly suggests, the picture—which likely depicts prostitutes seated on a bench in Papeete—may also allude to the public displays of ritualized sex performed by and for the pre-colonial ario’i elite. It may also reference, she notes, contemporary dance, an art form disparaged and discouraged by colonial authorities for both its eroticism and its defiant, autochthonous indigeneity. (Tahitian dance is one of the few in the world that is frequently performed sitting down. Unlike ballet, it is a terrestrial, not an aerial form.)

Childs’s account of Gauguin is full of new discoveries and insights; but lacking sufficient reference to the wider political and artistic frame, it nevertheless feels pinched. From the beginning of his career, Gauguin was repelled by the odor of political, social, and sexual conformism. (One might actually say, from before the beginning, since his grandmother was the great socialist, feminist, and activist, Flora Tristan.) Cultivating subcultures of deviance wherever he found them, he befriended the prodigies Emile Bernard and Charles Laval, the mad genius Vincent van Gogh, the crippled Jewish Dutch artist Meijer de Haan, as well as the notorious invertis Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. By the end of his life, Gauguin’s few friends were Tahitian, Marquesan, and Southeast Asian activists and troublemakers. His nationality and sexuality—and perhaps even his gender—were open questions, while his stance toward the most significant geopolitical issue of the day, imperialism, was unambiguous: he opposed it, antagonizing local gendarmes and colonial bureaucrats in Paris, Papeete, and Hiva Oa. Indeed, Gauguin died in the Marquesas in 1903 just days before he was to be deported. He lived and worked on a wide stage, and his work has been profoundly influential; any synthetic analysis of his art and life should acknowledge that fact.

Chapters 5 and 6 explore the lives and work of the Americans Adams and La Farge in Tahiti. Adams was the wealthy scion of the powerful Boston family of that name: he was a historian, professor, public intellectual, and great grandson of the second president, and grandson of the sixth. After completing a massive history of the United States—and still mourning the death a few years before of his wife by suicide—he left in 1890 on a more than year-long Pacific tour with his friend, the artist La Farge. (He paid the latter’s way.) Childs makes much of the frequent comments in his letters and diaries that he was seeking—and for the most part failing—to find in the Pacific the “old gold” women (the reference is to skin color) who exhibited the ancient, vanishing, untainted, Polynesian body, comportment, and character that he admired. She proposes that Adams’s sexist language did not, however, indicate so much a search for sexual delight—Adams and La Farge appear to have remained chaste during their trip—as feminine companionship of the kind he had found so gratifying in the salons of Washington, DC, or in the company of his friend (and mistress) Elizabeth Sherman Cameron. It was only after he had met up with and been adopted into the aristocratic Teva-Salmon clan in Tahiti, according to Childs, that he found what he had been looking for: a lineage as pure as his own and as significantly engaged in national politics.

Child’s account of Adam’s life and travels is vivid, but her examination of Adam’s ethno-history of the Teva-Salmon family, written in the voice of the family matriarch Arii Taimai (the intellectual culmination of the trip—it was published in 1901), is perfunctory, occupying little more than a single paragraph and failing to adequately place the text in the history of ethno-historical and biographical endeavor. Moreover, Child does not take up here the question of Adams’s anti-Semitism, which is vicious and almost ubiquitous in his writing. How could a man so much in search of racial purity (“old gold”) and so full of disdain for the Jew have found such satisfaction in an indigenous family that was in fact half-Jewish? The answer may be that Adams saw something of himself in the Jews; like them, he was one of the “chosen people” whose status and very existence was threatened by race-mixing.

Childs’s examination of La Farge is less concerned with psycho-biographical speculation and more with career development and marketing. It offers a methodical unfolding of La Farge’s Tahitian period, and provides new, photographic sources for two works, the splendid watercolor titled Entrance to the Tautira River, Tahiti (ca. 1893–94) and the much larger oil, The Entrance to the Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish (ca. 1895). But Childs’s discussions of La Farge’s work is marred by iconographic implausibility. For example, the idea that the two females in Women Bathing in Papara River (1891) “conjure” (180) Diana (Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon) and Venus (Goddess of Love) is unlikely: first, the two mythological figures are never represented together; second, Diana is shown here with none of her attributes, such as her bow, a crescent moon, a deer, stag, or Acteon; and third, Venus is never shown sitting, legs drawn up and crossed, in three inches of water. Nor is the small, slender Tahitian in Fisherman Spearing a Fish in any way derived from the powerful figure of Poseidon holding a trident. The famous Artemision Bronze or God from the Sea—which may be either Poseidon or Zeus—in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens was only discovered in 1925 and was thus unknown to either Spitz or La Farge. In addition, Childs’s suggestion that as compared to the languid females in the Entrance to the Tautira River watercolor, the four vaguely painted men in the small watercolor Natives Cooking Poi, Tahiti (1891) are “active agents, striding across the Tahitian shores” is exaggerated: one figure stands in the water, one leans against a tree, one looks up and to the left, and the last lowers a log on the fire. The small watercolor Study on the Reef at Tautira, Tahiti (1891) is not “noticeably empty of human presence and quietly oblivious to the tale of sadness on the shores of the island” (188). It is first of all a landscape “study” that should be compared to other small-scale, subject-less watercolors by La Farge. It is—more tentatively—an essay in Symbolist style, derived from Gustave Courbet and James Whistler’s well-known Normandy seascapes of the 1860s, and more recent works by Claude Monet. La Farge’s place in international Symbolism is nowhere broached in Vanishing Paradise, though an examination might have shed light on the entire question of artistic retreat to the remote, folkloric, exotic, dream-like, and anti-modern—the very “vanishing” that is the book’s concern.

The conclusion of Vanishing Paradise takes the form of a polemic “against vanishing,” though it is clear throughout that Childs judges the myth of a disappearing indigenous culture and society to be a pernicious one. She examines a few artworks that post-date the Gauguin/Adams/La Farge visits, but not the most important ones by Henri Matisse who spent three months there in 1930 and later made cut-outs inspired in part by the shapes and colors of Oceania (John Klein, “Matisse after Tahiti: The Domestication of Exotic Memory,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, no. 1 (1997): 44–89). She also describes the continuing importance of the Teva-Salmon family in Tahitian history and their entanglement with the putative American aristocracy—the Roosevelt and Adams clans. She further highlights the way the Tahitian elite may have validated American stereotypes about the Pacific for the purpose of obtaining crucial financial support. Finally, she notes that despite what she earlier described as the “imperialist nostalgia” (a term coined by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo to describe the lament of the exploiter) implicit in the works of Gauguin, La Farge, and others, a number of contemporary Tahitians have turned the myths to their own, anti-colonial political purposes. Yet this concluding section of Childs’s book, addressing the indigenous perspective on “vanishing,” is too brief to count as the “double history” (a phrase adapted from the writing of historian Greg Dening) Childs described in her introduction as one of her chief goals.

Nevertheless, Vanishing Paradise is an ambitious and valuable book, full of keen observations about photography, the Exposition Universelle, the Teva-Salmon clan, French and English guidebooks and travel literature, and prevailing stereotypes about the South Seas. But it also disappoints, perhaps most of all in offering only a brief examination of Gauguin’s and La Farge’s Tahitian artworks. In both cases, a more thorough art-historical analysis would have yielded greater insight into the politics and meaning of Tahitian vanishing and surviving.