Date of Submission
Spring 2022
Academic Program
Art History; Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literature
Project Advisor 1
Laurie Dahlberg
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues as a case study, this paper examines how public sculpture at the 1878 world's fair provided a permanent alternative to the ephemeral cases of human display popular at other 19th century fairs and thereby perpetuated a more durable image of an ambiguous, sexualized, non-white, ethnic “other” in Europe into the 20th and 21st centuries.
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Guillotin, Olivia Liu, "Les six continents: An Exploration of Political Visual Rhetoric in Public Sculpture" (2022). Senior Projects Spring 2022. 158.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2022/158
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
Included in
Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, European History Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Landscape Architecture Commons, Museum Studies Commons, Other French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration Commons, Sculpture Commons, Social Justice Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons, Tourism Commons, Women's Studies Commons