The Fairest of Them All By Alex Teller
“Y
ou could never imagine how wonderful the fair is,” Jane Elliott Sever wrote to her aunt back home in Massachusetts while visiting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. “Every day that we go, some new and more beautiful thing appears.” Jane’s wonder and astonishment could be attributed to her youth (she was 16 years old when she traveled to Chicago for the fair). But her impressions are representative of how millions of other visitors experienced the relentless barrage of visual stimuli in the “White City” and along the Midway Plaisance. The fairgrounds’ 700 acres— encompassing everything from the latest technological innovations to fine art and entertainment— exceeded any single person’s capacity for description. At the end of the day, one simply stood in awe, searched for the right way to characterize the fair’s epic grandeur, and fell back on words like “wonderful” and “beautiful.” The 1893 World’s Fair was designed to elicit these kinds of reactions. As the grandest international spectacle in a
great age of spectacles, the event shaped the expectations, experiences, and memories of audiences through a dazzling array of imagery. A new exhibition at the Newberry, Pictures from an Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair, curated by Diane Dillon, examines the fair’s immense visual power. Open through the end of 2018, it is the first major exhibition to take place in the Newberry’s newly renovated first f loor. The images at the heart of the fair often spoke for themselves. Marveling at the electric light that radiated across the fair at night, Jane Elliott Sever paid special attention to the fountains in the Grand Basin, bathed in “a pure shimmering white, then changing to rose, then a pale green, then blue, yellow, then green, rose and white together, making a
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