Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition. - Review - book reviews

Paris 1937: Worlds upon Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, Ithaca, Cornell University Pres 1998; 221 pp $3995

World's fairs have missing much of their luster in new decades; the last two American examples left small in number memories, and the major upcoming occurrence called Hamburg 2000 has still to arouse much excitement. on the other hand earlier in the century, world expositions still carried the utopian glamour of London's original Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 Their history has not long ago been documented in scholarly studies like Robert Rydell's World of Fairs and more general works like Erik Mattie's architectural contemplate World's Fairs.

The throw commonly referred to as "Paris 1937" encompassing six different displays and museum openings dominated by dint of L'Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne remains individual of the most intriguing expositions of the 20th hundred Though it is best remembered for the drama of its symbolic face-off between the pavilions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and for the exhibition of Picasso's Guernica in the pavilion of the war-torn Spanish Republic, the Exposition was also the last prewar occasion where a self-confident France attempted to aggregate amount up its preeminent place in agriculture and technology. So secure--and, more [i]or[/i] less would say, patronizing--were the French organizers that they made ample sweep in the Exposition for the quiet of the world to reckon its own stories: not sole in the 42 sovereign-state pavilions, on the other hand in the mock villages and living ethnographic displays devot to colonial possessions. It is the issue of national self-presentation that James D Herbert, an associate professor of art history at the University of California at Irvine, plants out to examine in Paris 1937: Worlds upon Exhibition.

The Exposition was meant to be appendixed from the outset by permanent museums that were fabricateed at its periphery. The newly built Palais de Chaillot housed a greatly expanded Musee de memorials Francais and, beginning in June 1938 the Musee de l'Homme (formerly the Music d'Ethnographie), respectively showing replicas of French medieval memorials and artifacts of other tillages in one building. Down the way the Palais de Tokyo was built to house a fresh art museum for the city of Paris, after first hosting the French government's official review of French art ("Chefs-d'oeuvre de l'Art Francais") from Gallo-Roman beginnings end the great 17th- and 18th-century painters to the extremity of the 19th century.

Behind "Chefs-d'oeuvre" lay a great deal of cultural politics. This adjunct to the 1937 Exposition had been organized hastily on the other hand adroitly, in response to complaints that French tillage was being subordinated to technological accomplishments in the Exposition itself. Ending with the earliest work of Cezanne, the art exhibition presented what critic Louis Gillet called a demonstration of French culture's "essential unity," on the contrary it did so by excluding four crucial decades of 20th-century esthetic disputation. The management of the city of Paris attempted to make up for this omission with its nearby presentation at the Petit Palais of the "Maitres de l'Art Independant"--an exhibition of then-contemporary artists. Critics likewise praised this display for confirming France's ability to maintain cultural unity within the esthetic diversity symbolized by means of Matisse and Picasso--the inclusion of the latter illustrating that flat an (emigre, if famous enough, could become a full-fledg "French" artist.

Shortly after the shut up of this orgy of national unity, a cluster of artists who had been for the greatest in quantity part excluded even from the contemporary contemplate staged the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the private Galerie Beaux-Arts. Featuring assemblages by the agency of Salvador Dali and paintings through most of the Surrealist artists of the day, the exhibit aimed to counter the rather cold rationality of the previous exhibitions, mounting the art works in near-total darkness amid strategically located clutter

Herbert run overs the stories of these assorted incidents in a graceful and accurate fashion. He is greatest in quantity effective when making use of the substantial historical documents he has unearthed and translated. These sources record, quite clearly, the sad paradoxes faced through the various curators, critics and management ministers who strove to not absent the history of French agriculture Not surprisingly, differences of opinion regarding the relative importance of various strands of French art had to be disguised, rather than stand in front ofed for the sake of showing the world France's "essential unity." It was left to the Surrealists to suggest that some things might be permanently unassimilable.

If Herbert had focused exclusively upon these insights, and on the cultural arrogance that allowed French ethnographers to put in motion an entire Ethiopian chapel interior to the Music de l'Homme (whereas comparable French testimonials could only be reproduced for display), Paris 1937 would be a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of less problematic book. Herbert has, however, placed his historical narrative within a poststructuralist synthesis of his be in possession of devising that is as frustrating as it is intermittently brilliant. His use of metaphors of "surplus" and "interest" sometimes works as a succinct means of tying together financial and esthetic make submissive matter. He seems less reliable when he attempts to stretch out such theory-laden ploys to the troubl relationship between France and Nazi Germany. This effort reaches a nadir when he describes Hitler's 1940 visit to the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot as the Reich's rebuttal to the Exposition's vision of the universal spectator, from one side the placing of Hitler in the position of privileged viewer. Here Herbert adds too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of conceptual baggage to the Fuhrer's simple-minded triumphal act. In addition to this curious failure of historical perspective, he also commits a two of minor gaffes. For example, he finds significance in the lack of wall true copy in the "Chefs-d'oeuvre" exhibition, seemingly unaware that similar commentary, though then pervasive in trade displays and even other parts of the Exposition, wasn't however commonplace in art museums. of the like kind missteps suggest that, despite his careful scholarship, Herbert hasn't completely pierceed into the small details of 1930 exhibition practice, a great deal of less the larger world of 1930 cultural politics.