Evoking Medieval Islam at Shangri La: Doris Duke’s Art Collection and Home in Hawai‘i

Doris Duke (1912-93) wrote very little about what motivated her interest in Islamic art, how she collected objects, or how she interpreted the environment she created. In fact, only a few times did she even allow journalists or photographers into Shangri La, the private estate on Oahu that she designed in an Islamic style to house the extensive collection of North African, Middle Eastern, and Indian art she gathered. A treasure trove exists in the archives of Duke University and Shangri La, however. A set of fascinating letters and telegrams between Duke and Mary Crane, a young scholar of Iranian art who was Duke's buying agent in New York in 1940-41, sheds light on important questions around Duke’s home and her collecting. Culminating with the purchase of a magnificent thirteenth-century Iranian mihrab (for which Duke beat out the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the engrossing letters invite readers to tangle with issues around design and evoking the past. I argue that by installing the extremely rare and historically important mihrab in her living room, Duke referenced medieval Islam while at the same time changing its significance, deliberately rejecting a specific sense of historicism in her twentieth-century hideaway. She repurposed the medieval past in her creation of her exotic private paradise hovering above the crashing waves in Hawai‘i.