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Fromentin on cactus grandiflora: The Aesthetics of Ecology in Une année dans le Sahel
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 57, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 46-57
- 10.1353/esp.2017.0004
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Whereas most orientalist painters used plants as markers of the Orient, Eugène Fromentin questioned the inventory-like quality of his peers’ approach. Contrary to the idea of “couleur locale,” the text of Une année dans le Sahel pleads for a type of representation that depicts the biological aspects of nature without falling into the essentialism of scientific illustration. The result is an aesthetics that disrupts dichotomies (essential elements/secondary features, foreground/background) and refuses to delimit the oriental space for a European viewer; instead, the interconnectedness of all beings presides over the representation with a dynamism that dislocates centers and hierarchies.