Civilisations - Season 1 Episode 8

The world changed as it adopted the principles of Enlightenment -especially after the American and French revolutions- and was physically transformed by industrialization, stressing reason (science), technology and profit. Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt stirred the Western fascination for it and started an escapist fashion of Orientalism, albeit largely a fantasy version of a romanticized East, while colonies enabled continuous confrontations in reality, in Peruvian-French Gauguin's case a never-ending sequence of frustrations even on paradisiac Tahiti. As a substitute for the Ancient history of the Old World, art schools in the New were fascinated by native American cultures, landscape and wildlife. Photography would impose harsh, vulgar realism, pioneers deviated from traditional technique and POV to create new, less aesthetic styles like expressionism.