ARTH 260 * Introduction to Art History * Professor Sarah Benson * Spring 2005

Reactions of visitors to the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889

Henry ADAMS (1838-1918) visited the Galerie des Machines at the Paris Exposition in 1900.  The experience left him   " lying in the Gallery of Machines..., his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new ."

" [T]o [me] the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.  As [I] grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, [I] began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.  The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring... "

Charles GARNIER, L'Habitation humaine . 1889, on the Islamic houses in his display at the fair:

" The ideal of happy life consisted of resting lazily in a cool place, surrounded by exquisite light and forms. Oriental life flowed, softly and voluptuously, behind these walls burning in the sun ."

Paul MORAND, cited in Philippe Julian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, Paris Exhibition 1900 , London, 1876.

" I made a thousand extraordinary journeys almost without moving; under the Eiffel Tower, near the little lake, was hidden the Tonkinese village with its junks and its women chewing betel; sometimes I watched the old Cambodian elephant sent by Doumer, called 'Chérie' drinking there. The Indo-Chinese theater adjoined the reproduction of the strange temple which had just been discovered and was called Angkor ... The entire hill was nothing but perfumes, incense, vanilla, and the aromatic fumes of the seraglio; one could hear the scraping of the Chinese violins, the sounds of castanets, the wailing flutes of Arab bands, the mystical howling of the Aissawas more heavily painted than De Max, the cries of the Ouled Naïl with their mobile bellies; I followed this opiate mixture, this perfume of Javanese dancing girls, sherbets and rahat-lakoum, as far as the Dahomean village ."

Muhammad Amin FAKRI, from delegation to Orientalist conference in Sweden, on the mosque of 1889:

" Its external form as a mosque was all there was. As for the interior, it had been set up as a coffeehouse, where Egyptian girls performed dances with young males, and dervishes whirled ."