How does functional art reveal colonial perspectives? In 1804—the year Napoleon crowned himself Emperor—French manufacturer Joseph Dufour launched his first scenic wallpaper, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (Savages of the Pacific Ocean). The wallpaper was meant to engulf a room in a “never-ending tableau” celebrating the voyages of Captain Cook. With boundless artistic liberties, France continued to produce scores of panoramic wallpapers that transformed the home into a space for scenic colonialism, bringing exotic visions of the colonial world into daily French life.
Marc Olivier is a professor in the Department of French and Italian and Co-director of BYU International Cinema. He is founding editor of the Icons of Horror series with Indiana University Press and author of Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (Indiana UP, 2020). He is a Fall 2024 Kennedy Center Research Fellow and is writing a book on wallpaper for Bloomsbury.
Part of the Kennedy Center's fall 2024 lecture series, "Legacies of Colonialism."