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Published Aug 2016
368 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
Drawing on his own career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating study of the powerful connection between art and the exotic.
From the early days of steamship travel, artists stifled by the culture of their homelands fled to islands, jungles, and deserts in search of new creative and emotional frontiers. Their flight inspired a unique body of work that doesn't fit squarely within the Western canon, yet may be some of the most original statements we have about the range and depth of the artistic imagination.
Focusing on six principal subjects, Jamie James locates "a lost national school" of artists who left their homes for the unknown. There is Walter Spies, the devastatingly handsome German painter who remade his life in Bali; Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who found fame in Europe; Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara dressed as an Arab man; the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and became a committed follower of voodoo. From France, Paul Gauguin left for Tahiti; and Victor Segalen, a naval doctor, poet, and novelist, immersed himself in classical Chinese civilization in imperial Peking.
In The Glamour of Strangeness, James evokes these extraordinary lives in portraits that bring the transcultural artist into sharp relief. Drawing on his own career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating study of the powerful connection between art and the exotic.
"Starred Review. This well-written text is a sharp, thought-provoking contribution to the ongoing conversation about transculturation." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. [A] richly detailed, absorbing cultural history... Abundant primary sources inform James' sharply drawn, sympathetic portraits." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. James is merrily entertaining in his exceptional erudition and nimble eloquence, and fluently and movingly insightful in his psychological, sexual, social, and aesthetic interpretations as he tells these astonishing, often tragic tales of intrepid self-creation and ardently chosen homelands." - Booklist
"A riveting account of some mightily 'other' lives - people of learning longing to be elsewhere, body or soul, and picturesquely succeeding: just as Jamie James does in his calling as their chronicler and kindred spirit." - Gini Alhadeff, author of Diary of a Djinn
This information about The Glamour of Strangeness was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jamie James is the author of The Music of the Spheres, The Snake Charmer, Rimbaud in Java, and other titles. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic Traveler, among others, and served as the art critic at The New Yorker and The Times of London. He moved to Indonesia in 1999.
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