Greenhouse Modernism: Race, Culture, and Ecological Exhibitions

Greenhouses in Paris forged links between atmospheres, plants, objects, and even people—sustaining a Hippocratic idea that climates determined species, races, and cultures. Connecting architectural history, mass culture, and painting, this presentation explores this environmental sensibility through several examples of Parisian greenhouse and greenhouse paintings exhibited at French Salons. In the 1840s-50s, Gottfried Semper called French greenhouses “exotic”/“erotic” spaces, but described the glass Crystal Palace as a “vacuum.” Following his distinction, I delineate two parallel forms of imperial display: the humid “greenhouse” and neutral “universalist” models. Several paintings by James Tissot present Japanese objects—and even one Asian woman—as constituent parts of a coherent greenhouse ecosystem. The objects blur together in a hazy atmosphere, suggesting a connection between non-European objects, people, plants, and tropical climates. Prefiguring the rise of human zoos in Paris, greenhouses popularized the notion of exhibiting race and culture within “exotic” atmospheres—linking Orientalist aesthetics and ecological management. By contrast, the 1862 display of Japanese objects exhibited similar objects like textiles and porcelains, but within one section of a universalist exhibitionary structure like the Crystal Palace in which there is no symbiotic or ecological relationship between structure and objects.

Overlooked by T.J. Clark and other scholars of spectacle, greenhouses were mass attractions that invoked tropical biomes and associated racial concepts. While “atmosphere” dominates discussions of Impressionist-era painting, dozens of greenhouse paintings reveal unexplored connections between atmospheric aesthetics and imperialism. Examining greenhouse paintings, I excavate an imperial modernism emergent from encounters between global trade, landscape management, climactic regulation, and modernist painting.