"The Traveling Coconut" in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature & Fine Arts

This article looks at Oller’s Coconuts from a global perspective considering his role as a well-traveled artist trained in Spain, and working between Paris and Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century.

However, our story begins in the kitchen with Alice B. Toklas and a recipe from her famous Cook Book of 1954. Alice B. Toklas’s “Coconut Marmalade” recipe comes to us courtesy of the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé, who describes the syrupy concoction as a “delicate dainty.” Incorporating recipes from Toklas’s Cook Book situates the culinary in relation to the materiality and corporeality of artistic and cultural production. Toklas’s Cook Book is a food memoir of her life with partner Gertrude Stein and the life they shared with many talented and renowned friends and acquaintances.  Toklas wrote Cook Book almost a decade after the death of Stein and while she was hospitalized for several months with hepatitis.  She elucidates upon their life in Paris, travels to the countryside, life during War and Occupation, the servants, the habits and tastes of many famous friends, their motorings in Aunt Pauline (a Model T Red Cross ambulance) and Godiva (a “two-seater open”), and recipes.

Francisco Oller’s Still Life with Coconuts, circa 1893, was featured as the signature image for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World (October 2015–January 2016.) Gracing the cover of all of the exhibition’s promotional materials are the verdant coconuts dramatically staged atop a wooden table. The entrance hall of Impressionism and the Caribbean featured only two paintings, hung side-by-side, with the introductory wall text: Oller’s Self-Portrait (1889–1892) on the left and Still Life with Coconuts on the right.

For more details about this online exclusive in Gulf Coast:

https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/winter/spring-2019/the-traveling-coconut/