The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has mounted an exhibit about Doris Duke’s Hawaiian pleasure palace Shangri La. Duke built the estate in Honolulu in the 1930’s, when she was a young woman, to house her expanding collection of Islamic art and artefacts. She built it in a broadly Islamic style, consulting designers in Iran and India to complete ornamental stone and wood work. But the estate is less impressive for its design, which is modern in plan and pastiche in detail, than for its ambition. It’s Duke’s innocent enthusiasm for all things Islamic that lights up the place.
It’s easy to dismiss the entire project as a rich girl’s fantasy of Islam, a term that’s used in the exhibit wall texts to describe any culture in the world that has come into historical contact with the religion. There are on display pieces from Spain, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and North India. One elegant wood table with white stone inlay and curved steel supports is attributed, hilariously, to “India (Goa), or Venice." (My guess is Venice, because the ornament depicts human figures with a expressiveness that’s highly unusual for Indian art.) There are some exquisite ceramics, tapestries and jewelry, but the quality of the work is irregular. The most powerful items are large format vintage color photographs that show views of the rooms and courtyard in delirious technicolor. Here two fantasies collide: the stately, sensuous Islamic palace and the easy, idyllic Hawaiian landscape. It seems strange that Duke traveled so far away, to a place with its own marvelously exotic history, only to bring another kind of exotic to it. But I admire Duke for choosing the fantasy of Islam. For a privileged young American woman in the 1930’s, it was highly original. Walking through the exhibit, one senses that it hit her hard.
Photo by Horst from Vogue, 1966.