Dr Kate Kangaslahti is an art and architectural historian based in Belgium. She graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1999 with a B.A. (Hons) in Art History and French, and received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2005. She served as the Sarah and William Holmes Scholar in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and in 2006 moved to Singapore, spending four years as an Assistant Professor in Modern Art History at the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University. Having relocated to Brussels in 2011 with her family, she now works as an independent scholar. Her research focuses upon the relationship between art and politics in France, and more widely Europe, in the first half of the twentieth century, with particular reference to cultural constructions of national identity, the role of the art press, and the situation of foreign artists practising in cultural centres between the wars.
In April 1937, Wassily Kandinsky, grieved that the city’s foreign-born abstract and Surrealist ar... more In April 1937, Wassily Kandinsky, grieved that the city’s foreign-born abstract and Surrealist artists had been largely excluded from the Exposition Internationale in Paris that year, approached the director of the Musée du Jeu de Paume to mount a show of contemporary art. Three months later an exhibition opened, small in scale, but bold in ambition: Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant proposed a broad historical survey, plotting the development of twentieth-century art to viewers as a succession of global movements. Despite such lofty intentions, however, the display at the Jeu de Paume, never truly moved beyond an anthology of Parisian painting, and for this reason, and others, the show was a source of professional conflict and personal disappointment to many. Retracing events at the Jeu de Paume through archival records and surviving exhibition materials and examining aspects of the exhibition’s organisation, installation and critical reception, this essay also reflects upon the tenuous place that both abstract art and foreign-born artists occupied in French cultural circles in the interwar period and explores the ways that critical and institutional diffidence gave rise to intrigues.
Musei e mostre tra le due guerre a cura di Silvia Cecchini e Patrizia Dragoni
In contrast to the museum, exhibitions, by virtue of their temporary nature, allow art to be mobi... more In contrast to the museum, exhibitions, by virtue of their temporary nature, allow art to be mobilised in response to more immediate demands and, in the case of the travelling exhibition, export historical narratives of the nation abroad. This essay examines four exhibitions of French and Italian art which took place in the decade before the Second World War: two in London, the “Exhibition of Italian Art” in 1930 and the “Exhibition of French Art” in 1932; and two in Paris, “L’Art italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo” in 1935 and the “Chefs d’œuvre de l’art francais” in 1937. In comparing the shows – their organisation, contents, display and critical reception – my intention is to unpick the various political, art historical, even economic interests which sought to marshal art in these years. If the different faces these retrospectives presented were neither faithful nor scholarly reflections, in each case the evocation of a distant past was a mirror that reflected the divergent needs of the present.
Contrariamente ai musei, la natura temporanea delle esposizioni permette all’arte di essere spostata in risposta a domande più immediate e, nel caso di esposizioni itineranti, di esportare narrative storiche della nazione all’estero. Questo saggio esamina quattro esibizioni d’arte francese e italiana che si sono tenute nel decennio che ha preceduto la Seconda Guerra Mondiale: due a Londra, “L’esposizione d’arte Italiana” del 1930 e “L’esposizione d’arte francese” del 1932; due a Parigi, “L’arte italiana da Cimabue a Tiepolo” del 1935 e “Capolavori dell’arte francese” del 1937. Dal confronto delle suddette – la loro organizzazione, i contenuti, l’esposizione e la critica – la mia intenzione è di discernere i fattori politici, artistici, ed anche economici che hanno spinto ha promuovere l’arte in questi anni. Se le varie sfaccettature che queste retrospettive hanno presentato non erano né fedeli e neppure riflessioni erudite, in ogni caso l’evocazione di un distante passato era uno specchio che rifletteva i divergenti bisogni del presente.
Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, 2000
Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s decorative schemes for the aeronautical and railway pavilions thrille... more Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s decorative schemes for the aeronautical and railway pavilions thrilled spectators at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris. The result of the artists’ close collaboration with the pavilions’ architects, and attracting some 30,000 visitors a day each, the Palais de l’Air and the Palais des Chemins de fer proved two of the most successful—two of the few true—realisations of the event’s overarching theme: the integration of art and technology and their application to modern life. The works the artists created marked the pinnacle of Robert Delaunay’s ten-year search for a monumental expression of ‘simultanism’, the name he early gave to his theories of colour’s constructive properties, and his organisation of the picture plane according its contrasts. ‘Colour,’ Delaunay stated in an interview in 1926, ‘through its harmonious and dissonant relationships, creates a penetrating rhythm, in a word, depth, a movement, an isolation beyond the perceptible surface.’ Tasked a decade later with commissions for some 2,500m2, the artists devised an expansive programme of murals, panels, reliefs in wood and concrete and sculptural installations. Their dynamic arrangements of rhythmic, penetrating, moving colour formed the perfect complement to the excitement surrounding contemporary travel and the speed associated with its new technologies; the realisation, Louis Cheronnet suggested, of ‘this perfect formula: vitesse = peinture non figurative.’ Despite the critic’s assertions, the Delaunays’ designs were neither wholly abstract nor overtly representational; they rather exploited structural parallels between the repertoire of forms the artists had long developed and the mechanical forces animating modern transportation. Concentric discs, contrasting semicircles and sinusoids conjured propellers, control panels, gearwheels and railway tracks; the compression of space, fragmentation of forms and absence of narrative description or linear perspective evoked the vertiginous thrill of flight or, alternately, fractured views glimpsed from a speeding train.
While examining the individual works that Robert and Sonia Delaunay created for the pavilions, my intention is to read the overall displays as a vast pictorial symphony in which the very proportions colour assumed operated as an allegory for the artists’ faith in humanity’s progress. The purpose of this essay is to unpick the artists’ leap from easel to wall and the projection of their work into the utopia of collective space in relation to three historical threads. Firstly, contemporary discourse advocating the mural as the only truly social form of art. At a time of ongoing economic crisis and general unrest, the embrace of the mural marked a move away from the individualist pursuits of the studio towards the collaboration of artist and architect and signalled a shift from works destined for market speculation to the shared value of those embedded in public spaces. Broader discussion in France of this kind about the social utility of art and the artist’s role in society memorably crystallised in the 1936 ‘Querelle du réalisme’; my second point will be to consider the extent to which the Delaunays answered Fernand Léger’s call for popular and eloquent art which remained true to the novel forms and artistic freedoms of the era. Their aesthetic transformation of modern mechanics—its merely functional aspects made marvellous through scale and colour—ties their works to Léger’s conceptualisation of a ‘new realism’ which found both its forms and its raison-d’être in modern life. Lastly, I will consider the Delaunays’ participation in the Exposition Internationale in relation to the rise of the Popular Front, as inextricably tied to the arrival of the left-wing government and its promotion of the value of work and popular leisure. Showcasing two recently nationalised industries, the aeronautical and railway pavilions enchanted the spectator with technology’s power to transform, even as international hostilities, already at play within the Exposition’s fairgrounds, foretold of the cataclysmic forces soon to be unleashed.
Efficacy/Efficacité. Word & Image Interactions VII, Jan 1, 2011
At the 1937 Exposition Internationale des art et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris the cons... more At the 1937 Exposition Internationale des art et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris the construction of national identity and the assertion of national prestige, always implicit within framework of the nineteenth century Expositions Universelles, took centre stage. The Nation was packaged as a neat social, economic and political entity for the consumption of an international audience. The aesthetic values of that package, the preference for certain idioms, architectural or otherwise, and the inclusion (or not) of overt political slogans, were all indicative of the style in which individual nations sought to project themselves. The national pavilions in Paris in 1937 then offer many examples of the way in which states, whether democratic or totalitarian, whether to the left or right of the political spectrum, conceived of and orchestrated the interrelations between text, image and space for propagandistic purpose. This paper takes as its focus the use of political symbolism and slogans (or their studied avoidance) within the pavilions of the major totalitarian powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the contribution of the country in which those nations were then vicariously waging war, namely Spain. The efficacy of each national pavilion in the dissemination of its message and/or the construction of a distinct identity is ultimately considered.
Academics, pompiers, official artists and the arrière-garde: defining modern and traditional in France, 1900-1960, Nov 1, 2009
In 1925 André Warnod declared in the daily Comœdia that: “The École de Paris exists. Later art hi... more In 1925 André Warnod declared in the daily Comœdia that: “The École de Paris exists. Later art historians will be able […] to define its character and study its makeup but we can still today affirm […] its power of attraction which brings to us artists from around the world.” As Warnod then set forth, the École de Paris denoted a loosely affiliated network of independent artists, both French and foreign-born, whose collective talents offered an alternative and preferred ‘School’ to the obsolete academic model. More remarkably, he insisted upon the contribution artists born outside France working in Paris made to the “prodigious richness” of contemporary French art. As a label, the École de Paris soon narrowed in contemporary writing to distinguish the work of foreign artists vis-à-vis that of French counterparts; at the most conservative, reactionary end of the critical spectrum it signified all that was the antithesis of and a threat to true French tradition (the École française). Yet the École de Paris never entirely lost its impetus as a means of laying claim to foreign artists whose art and success was perceived to reflect, first and foremost, the city in which they had chosen to live and work. This was to become all the more apparent during the 1930s when, having lost momentum as a critical term indicating a practising group of artists, the École de Paris developed as an art-historical and museological category in which national origins were subordinated to the project of identifying Paris as the locus of modern art. Did the École de Paris exist as Warnod (or later others) described it? His epithet has proved both enduring and yet amorphous, but my purpose is not to attempt to establish a definitive body of artists, united along ethnic, national or even stylistic lines. Of more interest here are the competing definitions which the term itself provoked, as evidence of the changing reception afforded to foreign artists practising in Paris between the wars.
Throughout the early twentieth century, Paris enjoyed an unrivaled cultural hegemony, attracting ... more Throughout the early twentieth century, Paris enjoyed an unrivaled cultural hegemony, attracting artists worldwide. While some may have been obliged to leave their places of birth because of pressing sociopolitical or economic factors, the choice of Paris for many was motivated by artistic pursuits. The creative practice of foreign-born artists working in the city in the first half of the twentieth century represents an artistic corpus through which we might study (voluntary) migration as a collective artistic experience, with rich examples of the ways in which artists drew on the visual culture of their new home while dwelling upon their respective national and ethnic origins. The reaction of artists to their new environment is, however, but one part of the process engendered by migration. In the reception offered to artists by their adopted home and audience, there is equally evident a negotiation through which the work of migrants is alternately included in and excluded from the predominant cultural realm. The objective of this paper is thus twofold: to nominate specific examples of the idioms which artists from diverse backgrounds developed in response to their experiences in Paris; and to offer a brief comparative analysis of the way in which their work was subsequently received within the critical and institutional networks which had emerged in the late nineteenth century, and which continued to evolve throughout the interwar period.
The Exposition Internationale International des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris i... more The Exposition Internationale International des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris in 1937 was destined to depict unity, consensus and prosperity, in the face of prevailing conditions to the contrary. France in the 1930s was economically stagnant and politically divided. Yet in the exposition's ensuing battle of representations, the host nation increasingly appeared unable to respond with any conviction to the overarching premise of its own theme--namely the integration of the arts into technology, defined by their application in daily life--nor, as a result, to project a coherence sense of identity. Its programme for the Exposition Internationale was marked by an absence of architectural uniformity, of any discernible style, modern or otherwise, which might have spoken of France with an eloquence equal to the idioms employed by its rivals (memorably translated by the confrontation of the German and Soviet Pavilions). Three exhibitions of art subsequently organised in conjunction with, but to varying degrees on the periphery of the Exposition proper, saw the host nation instead draw upon a traditional strength: art, neither as subservient to function, nor limited to temporal use, but as an absolute value, art as the true vehicle of its identity. 'Le patrimoine' was that which expressed the best of and best expressed 'la patrie'. The Chefs-d’œuvre de l’art français at the newly constructed Palais de Tokio; the Maîtres de l’art indépendant at the Petit Palais; and the Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant at the Musée du Jeu de Paume collectively assembled and displayed close to 3,000 works of art in a celebration of the French Tradition. While housed in separate institutions and presented by different⎯competing⎯administrative bodies, what emerges is the way in which politics and national sentiment exercised a common and consuming influence over the selection of artworks and the representation of artists in each exhibition. On the eve of the Second World War, it was through a carefully constructed and singularly nationalistic vision of its cultural supremacy that the host nation attempted to display a cohesive and expansive vision of identity, in the face of both the totalitarian powers and the nation's own interwar malaise.
From 1926 until 1960, Greek-born Christian Zervos (Kristos Zervos) conceived and painstakingly co... more From 1926 until 1960, Greek-born Christian Zervos (Kristos Zervos) conceived and painstakingly compiled 97 issues of Cahiers d’art. In the interwar Parisian art world, still then the world’s premier market and hardly bereft of publications on art, Zervos’s review immediately stood apart, both in style and substance. Each number was characterised by clear and sympathetic typography, a shrewd appreciation of white space and an abundant, but carefully orchestrated, use of photography: Cahiers d’art marked the ascendancy of the visual essay as a means of knowing art and in its pages the work of art entered (what Walter Benjamin later heralded as) the age of its mechanical reproduction. As for content, Zervos deftly intermixed a diverse range of subjects and approaches, combining articles about ancient practices with items on the modern and contemporary, juxtaposing extra-European and European traditions, alternating critical or historical texts with literary pieces. He sought contributions from artists themselves as well as from an important array of international writers whose analyses—on painting, sculpture, architecture, design, cinema, photography, poetry, ethnology, even music—were to become key texts in the narrative of modern art.
The focus of this paper is the role which Zervos played, through his review, and later the publishing house and gallery he founded under the same name, in the global diffusion of artworks and the ideas surrounding their creation in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the breadth of his own aesthetic curiosity and the network of talented artists, writers and dealers he fostered within and beyond France, Zervos brought a wider world of art to Paris; conversely, through the international circulation of his journal, particularly influential in the US, Germany and Switzerland, he exported a heavily Parisian vision of contemporary art worldwide. Among the different strengths and limitations of his cultural legacy to be considered here: the exceptional importance Zervos accorded to Pablo Picasso and Cubism; his near wilful misrepresentation of genuinely abstract art; and his emphasis upon art-making as an intuitive, quasi-mystical process.
In April 1937, Wassily Kandinsky, grieved that the city’s foreign-born abstract and Surrealist ar... more In April 1937, Wassily Kandinsky, grieved that the city’s foreign-born abstract and Surrealist artists had been largely excluded from the Exposition Internationale in Paris that year, approached the director of the Musée du Jeu de Paume to mount a show of contemporary art. Three months later an exhibition opened, small in scale, but bold in ambition: Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant proposed a broad historical survey, plotting the development of twentieth-century art to viewers as a succession of global movements. Despite such lofty intentions, however, the display at the Jeu de Paume, never truly moved beyond an anthology of Parisian painting, and for this reason, and others, the show was a source of professional conflict and personal disappointment to many. Retracing events at the Jeu de Paume through archival records and surviving exhibition materials and examining aspects of the exhibition’s organisation, installation and critical reception, this essay also reflects upon the tenuous place that both abstract art and foreign-born artists occupied in French cultural circles in the interwar period and explores the ways that critical and institutional diffidence gave rise to intrigues.
Musei e mostre tra le due guerre a cura di Silvia Cecchini e Patrizia Dragoni
In contrast to the museum, exhibitions, by virtue of their temporary nature, allow art to be mobi... more In contrast to the museum, exhibitions, by virtue of their temporary nature, allow art to be mobilised in response to more immediate demands and, in the case of the travelling exhibition, export historical narratives of the nation abroad. This essay examines four exhibitions of French and Italian art which took place in the decade before the Second World War: two in London, the “Exhibition of Italian Art” in 1930 and the “Exhibition of French Art” in 1932; and two in Paris, “L’Art italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo” in 1935 and the “Chefs d’œuvre de l’art francais” in 1937. In comparing the shows – their organisation, contents, display and critical reception – my intention is to unpick the various political, art historical, even economic interests which sought to marshal art in these years. If the different faces these retrospectives presented were neither faithful nor scholarly reflections, in each case the evocation of a distant past was a mirror that reflected the divergent needs of the present.
Contrariamente ai musei, la natura temporanea delle esposizioni permette all’arte di essere spostata in risposta a domande più immediate e, nel caso di esposizioni itineranti, di esportare narrative storiche della nazione all’estero. Questo saggio esamina quattro esibizioni d’arte francese e italiana che si sono tenute nel decennio che ha preceduto la Seconda Guerra Mondiale: due a Londra, “L’esposizione d’arte Italiana” del 1930 e “L’esposizione d’arte francese” del 1932; due a Parigi, “L’arte italiana da Cimabue a Tiepolo” del 1935 e “Capolavori dell’arte francese” del 1937. Dal confronto delle suddette – la loro organizzazione, i contenuti, l’esposizione e la critica – la mia intenzione è di discernere i fattori politici, artistici, ed anche economici che hanno spinto ha promuovere l’arte in questi anni. Se le varie sfaccettature che queste retrospettive hanno presentato non erano né fedeli e neppure riflessioni erudite, in ogni caso l’evocazione di un distante passato era uno specchio che rifletteva i divergenti bisogni del presente.
Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, 2000
Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s decorative schemes for the aeronautical and railway pavilions thrille... more Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s decorative schemes for the aeronautical and railway pavilions thrilled spectators at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris. The result of the artists’ close collaboration with the pavilions’ architects, and attracting some 30,000 visitors a day each, the Palais de l’Air and the Palais des Chemins de fer proved two of the most successful—two of the few true—realisations of the event’s overarching theme: the integration of art and technology and their application to modern life. The works the artists created marked the pinnacle of Robert Delaunay’s ten-year search for a monumental expression of ‘simultanism’, the name he early gave to his theories of colour’s constructive properties, and his organisation of the picture plane according its contrasts. ‘Colour,’ Delaunay stated in an interview in 1926, ‘through its harmonious and dissonant relationships, creates a penetrating rhythm, in a word, depth, a movement, an isolation beyond the perceptible surface.’ Tasked a decade later with commissions for some 2,500m2, the artists devised an expansive programme of murals, panels, reliefs in wood and concrete and sculptural installations. Their dynamic arrangements of rhythmic, penetrating, moving colour formed the perfect complement to the excitement surrounding contemporary travel and the speed associated with its new technologies; the realisation, Louis Cheronnet suggested, of ‘this perfect formula: vitesse = peinture non figurative.’ Despite the critic’s assertions, the Delaunays’ designs were neither wholly abstract nor overtly representational; they rather exploited structural parallels between the repertoire of forms the artists had long developed and the mechanical forces animating modern transportation. Concentric discs, contrasting semicircles and sinusoids conjured propellers, control panels, gearwheels and railway tracks; the compression of space, fragmentation of forms and absence of narrative description or linear perspective evoked the vertiginous thrill of flight or, alternately, fractured views glimpsed from a speeding train.
While examining the individual works that Robert and Sonia Delaunay created for the pavilions, my intention is to read the overall displays as a vast pictorial symphony in which the very proportions colour assumed operated as an allegory for the artists’ faith in humanity’s progress. The purpose of this essay is to unpick the artists’ leap from easel to wall and the projection of their work into the utopia of collective space in relation to three historical threads. Firstly, contemporary discourse advocating the mural as the only truly social form of art. At a time of ongoing economic crisis and general unrest, the embrace of the mural marked a move away from the individualist pursuits of the studio towards the collaboration of artist and architect and signalled a shift from works destined for market speculation to the shared value of those embedded in public spaces. Broader discussion in France of this kind about the social utility of art and the artist’s role in society memorably crystallised in the 1936 ‘Querelle du réalisme’; my second point will be to consider the extent to which the Delaunays answered Fernand Léger’s call for popular and eloquent art which remained true to the novel forms and artistic freedoms of the era. Their aesthetic transformation of modern mechanics—its merely functional aspects made marvellous through scale and colour—ties their works to Léger’s conceptualisation of a ‘new realism’ which found both its forms and its raison-d’être in modern life. Lastly, I will consider the Delaunays’ participation in the Exposition Internationale in relation to the rise of the Popular Front, as inextricably tied to the arrival of the left-wing government and its promotion of the value of work and popular leisure. Showcasing two recently nationalised industries, the aeronautical and railway pavilions enchanted the spectator with technology’s power to transform, even as international hostilities, already at play within the Exposition’s fairgrounds, foretold of the cataclysmic forces soon to be unleashed.
Efficacy/Efficacité. Word & Image Interactions VII, Jan 1, 2011
At the 1937 Exposition Internationale des art et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris the cons... more At the 1937 Exposition Internationale des art et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris the construction of national identity and the assertion of national prestige, always implicit within framework of the nineteenth century Expositions Universelles, took centre stage. The Nation was packaged as a neat social, economic and political entity for the consumption of an international audience. The aesthetic values of that package, the preference for certain idioms, architectural or otherwise, and the inclusion (or not) of overt political slogans, were all indicative of the style in which individual nations sought to project themselves. The national pavilions in Paris in 1937 then offer many examples of the way in which states, whether democratic or totalitarian, whether to the left or right of the political spectrum, conceived of and orchestrated the interrelations between text, image and space for propagandistic purpose. This paper takes as its focus the use of political symbolism and slogans (or their studied avoidance) within the pavilions of the major totalitarian powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the contribution of the country in which those nations were then vicariously waging war, namely Spain. The efficacy of each national pavilion in the dissemination of its message and/or the construction of a distinct identity is ultimately considered.
Academics, pompiers, official artists and the arrière-garde: defining modern and traditional in France, 1900-1960, Nov 1, 2009
In 1925 André Warnod declared in the daily Comœdia that: “The École de Paris exists. Later art hi... more In 1925 André Warnod declared in the daily Comœdia that: “The École de Paris exists. Later art historians will be able […] to define its character and study its makeup but we can still today affirm […] its power of attraction which brings to us artists from around the world.” As Warnod then set forth, the École de Paris denoted a loosely affiliated network of independent artists, both French and foreign-born, whose collective talents offered an alternative and preferred ‘School’ to the obsolete academic model. More remarkably, he insisted upon the contribution artists born outside France working in Paris made to the “prodigious richness” of contemporary French art. As a label, the École de Paris soon narrowed in contemporary writing to distinguish the work of foreign artists vis-à-vis that of French counterparts; at the most conservative, reactionary end of the critical spectrum it signified all that was the antithesis of and a threat to true French tradition (the École française). Yet the École de Paris never entirely lost its impetus as a means of laying claim to foreign artists whose art and success was perceived to reflect, first and foremost, the city in which they had chosen to live and work. This was to become all the more apparent during the 1930s when, having lost momentum as a critical term indicating a practising group of artists, the École de Paris developed as an art-historical and museological category in which national origins were subordinated to the project of identifying Paris as the locus of modern art. Did the École de Paris exist as Warnod (or later others) described it? His epithet has proved both enduring and yet amorphous, but my purpose is not to attempt to establish a definitive body of artists, united along ethnic, national or even stylistic lines. Of more interest here are the competing definitions which the term itself provoked, as evidence of the changing reception afforded to foreign artists practising in Paris between the wars.
Throughout the early twentieth century, Paris enjoyed an unrivaled cultural hegemony, attracting ... more Throughout the early twentieth century, Paris enjoyed an unrivaled cultural hegemony, attracting artists worldwide. While some may have been obliged to leave their places of birth because of pressing sociopolitical or economic factors, the choice of Paris for many was motivated by artistic pursuits. The creative practice of foreign-born artists working in the city in the first half of the twentieth century represents an artistic corpus through which we might study (voluntary) migration as a collective artistic experience, with rich examples of the ways in which artists drew on the visual culture of their new home while dwelling upon their respective national and ethnic origins. The reaction of artists to their new environment is, however, but one part of the process engendered by migration. In the reception offered to artists by their adopted home and audience, there is equally evident a negotiation through which the work of migrants is alternately included in and excluded from the predominant cultural realm. The objective of this paper is thus twofold: to nominate specific examples of the idioms which artists from diverse backgrounds developed in response to their experiences in Paris; and to offer a brief comparative analysis of the way in which their work was subsequently received within the critical and institutional networks which had emerged in the late nineteenth century, and which continued to evolve throughout the interwar period.
The Exposition Internationale International des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris i... more The Exposition Internationale International des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris in 1937 was destined to depict unity, consensus and prosperity, in the face of prevailing conditions to the contrary. France in the 1930s was economically stagnant and politically divided. Yet in the exposition's ensuing battle of representations, the host nation increasingly appeared unable to respond with any conviction to the overarching premise of its own theme--namely the integration of the arts into technology, defined by their application in daily life--nor, as a result, to project a coherence sense of identity. Its programme for the Exposition Internationale was marked by an absence of architectural uniformity, of any discernible style, modern or otherwise, which might have spoken of France with an eloquence equal to the idioms employed by its rivals (memorably translated by the confrontation of the German and Soviet Pavilions). Three exhibitions of art subsequently organised in conjunction with, but to varying degrees on the periphery of the Exposition proper, saw the host nation instead draw upon a traditional strength: art, neither as subservient to function, nor limited to temporal use, but as an absolute value, art as the true vehicle of its identity. 'Le patrimoine' was that which expressed the best of and best expressed 'la patrie'. The Chefs-d’œuvre de l’art français at the newly constructed Palais de Tokio; the Maîtres de l’art indépendant at the Petit Palais; and the Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant at the Musée du Jeu de Paume collectively assembled and displayed close to 3,000 works of art in a celebration of the French Tradition. While housed in separate institutions and presented by different⎯competing⎯administrative bodies, what emerges is the way in which politics and national sentiment exercised a common and consuming influence over the selection of artworks and the representation of artists in each exhibition. On the eve of the Second World War, it was through a carefully constructed and singularly nationalistic vision of its cultural supremacy that the host nation attempted to display a cohesive and expansive vision of identity, in the face of both the totalitarian powers and the nation's own interwar malaise.
From 1926 until 1960, Greek-born Christian Zervos (Kristos Zervos) conceived and painstakingly co... more From 1926 until 1960, Greek-born Christian Zervos (Kristos Zervos) conceived and painstakingly compiled 97 issues of Cahiers d’art. In the interwar Parisian art world, still then the world’s premier market and hardly bereft of publications on art, Zervos’s review immediately stood apart, both in style and substance. Each number was characterised by clear and sympathetic typography, a shrewd appreciation of white space and an abundant, but carefully orchestrated, use of photography: Cahiers d’art marked the ascendancy of the visual essay as a means of knowing art and in its pages the work of art entered (what Walter Benjamin later heralded as) the age of its mechanical reproduction. As for content, Zervos deftly intermixed a diverse range of subjects and approaches, combining articles about ancient practices with items on the modern and contemporary, juxtaposing extra-European and European traditions, alternating critical or historical texts with literary pieces. He sought contributions from artists themselves as well as from an important array of international writers whose analyses—on painting, sculpture, architecture, design, cinema, photography, poetry, ethnology, even music—were to become key texts in the narrative of modern art.
The focus of this paper is the role which Zervos played, through his review, and later the publishing house and gallery he founded under the same name, in the global diffusion of artworks and the ideas surrounding their creation in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the breadth of his own aesthetic curiosity and the network of talented artists, writers and dealers he fostered within and beyond France, Zervos brought a wider world of art to Paris; conversely, through the international circulation of his journal, particularly influential in the US, Germany and Switzerland, he exported a heavily Parisian vision of contemporary art worldwide. Among the different strengths and limitations of his cultural legacy to be considered here: the exceptional importance Zervos accorded to Pablo Picasso and Cubism; his near wilful misrepresentation of genuinely abstract art; and his emphasis upon art-making as an intuitive, quasi-mystical process.
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Contrariamente ai musei, la natura temporanea delle esposizioni permette all’arte di essere spostata in risposta a domande più immediate e, nel caso di esposizioni itineranti, di esportare narrative storiche della nazione all’estero. Questo saggio esamina quattro esibizioni d’arte francese e italiana che si sono tenute nel decennio che ha preceduto la Seconda Guerra Mondiale: due a Londra, “L’esposizione d’arte Italiana” del 1930 e “L’esposizione d’arte francese” del 1932; due a Parigi, “L’arte italiana da Cimabue a Tiepolo” del 1935 e “Capolavori dell’arte francese” del 1937. Dal confronto delle suddette – la loro organizzazione, i contenuti, l’esposizione e la critica – la mia intenzione è di discernere i fattori politici, artistici, ed anche economici che hanno spinto ha promuovere l’arte in questi anni. Se le varie sfaccettature che queste retrospettive hanno presentato non erano né fedeli e neppure riflessioni erudite, in ogni caso l’evocazione di un distante passato era uno specchio che rifletteva i divergenti bisogni del presente.
While examining the individual works that Robert and Sonia Delaunay created for the pavilions, my intention is to read the overall displays as a vast pictorial symphony in which the very proportions colour assumed operated as an allegory for the artists’ faith in humanity’s progress. The purpose of this essay is to unpick the artists’ leap from easel to wall and the projection of their work into the utopia of collective space in relation to three historical threads. Firstly, contemporary discourse advocating the mural as the only truly social form of art. At a time of ongoing economic crisis and general unrest, the embrace of the mural marked a move away from the individualist pursuits of the studio towards the collaboration of artist and architect and signalled a shift from works destined for market speculation to the shared value of those embedded in public spaces. Broader discussion in France of this kind about the social utility of art and the artist’s role in society memorably crystallised in the 1936 ‘Querelle du réalisme’; my second point will be to consider the extent to which the Delaunays answered Fernand Léger’s call for popular and eloquent art which remained true to the novel forms and artistic freedoms of the era. Their aesthetic transformation of modern mechanics—its merely functional aspects made marvellous through scale and colour—ties their works to Léger’s conceptualisation of a ‘new realism’ which found both its forms and its raison-d’être in modern life. Lastly, I will consider the Delaunays’ participation in the Exposition Internationale in relation to the rise of the Popular Front, as inextricably tied to the arrival of the left-wing government and its promotion of the value of work and popular leisure. Showcasing two recently nationalised industries, the aeronautical and railway pavilions enchanted the spectator with technology’s power to transform, even as international hostilities, already at play within the Exposition’s fairgrounds, foretold of the cataclysmic forces soon to be unleashed.
The focus of this paper is the role which Zervos played, through his review, and later the publishing house and gallery he founded under the same name, in the global diffusion of artworks and the ideas surrounding their creation in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the breadth of his own aesthetic curiosity and the network of talented artists, writers and dealers he fostered within and beyond France, Zervos brought a wider world of art to Paris; conversely, through the international circulation of his journal, particularly influential in the US, Germany and Switzerland, he exported a heavily Parisian vision of contemporary art worldwide. Among the different strengths and limitations of his cultural legacy to be considered here: the exceptional importance Zervos accorded to Pablo Picasso and Cubism; his near wilful misrepresentation of genuinely abstract art; and his emphasis upon art-making as an intuitive, quasi-mystical process.
Contrariamente ai musei, la natura temporanea delle esposizioni permette all’arte di essere spostata in risposta a domande più immediate e, nel caso di esposizioni itineranti, di esportare narrative storiche della nazione all’estero. Questo saggio esamina quattro esibizioni d’arte francese e italiana che si sono tenute nel decennio che ha preceduto la Seconda Guerra Mondiale: due a Londra, “L’esposizione d’arte Italiana” del 1930 e “L’esposizione d’arte francese” del 1932; due a Parigi, “L’arte italiana da Cimabue a Tiepolo” del 1935 e “Capolavori dell’arte francese” del 1937. Dal confronto delle suddette – la loro organizzazione, i contenuti, l’esposizione e la critica – la mia intenzione è di discernere i fattori politici, artistici, ed anche economici che hanno spinto ha promuovere l’arte in questi anni. Se le varie sfaccettature che queste retrospettive hanno presentato non erano né fedeli e neppure riflessioni erudite, in ogni caso l’evocazione di un distante passato era uno specchio che rifletteva i divergenti bisogni del presente.
While examining the individual works that Robert and Sonia Delaunay created for the pavilions, my intention is to read the overall displays as a vast pictorial symphony in which the very proportions colour assumed operated as an allegory for the artists’ faith in humanity’s progress. The purpose of this essay is to unpick the artists’ leap from easel to wall and the projection of their work into the utopia of collective space in relation to three historical threads. Firstly, contemporary discourse advocating the mural as the only truly social form of art. At a time of ongoing economic crisis and general unrest, the embrace of the mural marked a move away from the individualist pursuits of the studio towards the collaboration of artist and architect and signalled a shift from works destined for market speculation to the shared value of those embedded in public spaces. Broader discussion in France of this kind about the social utility of art and the artist’s role in society memorably crystallised in the 1936 ‘Querelle du réalisme’; my second point will be to consider the extent to which the Delaunays answered Fernand Léger’s call for popular and eloquent art which remained true to the novel forms and artistic freedoms of the era. Their aesthetic transformation of modern mechanics—its merely functional aspects made marvellous through scale and colour—ties their works to Léger’s conceptualisation of a ‘new realism’ which found both its forms and its raison-d’être in modern life. Lastly, I will consider the Delaunays’ participation in the Exposition Internationale in relation to the rise of the Popular Front, as inextricably tied to the arrival of the left-wing government and its promotion of the value of work and popular leisure. Showcasing two recently nationalised industries, the aeronautical and railway pavilions enchanted the spectator with technology’s power to transform, even as international hostilities, already at play within the Exposition’s fairgrounds, foretold of the cataclysmic forces soon to be unleashed.
The focus of this paper is the role which Zervos played, through his review, and later the publishing house and gallery he founded under the same name, in the global diffusion of artworks and the ideas surrounding their creation in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the breadth of his own aesthetic curiosity and the network of talented artists, writers and dealers he fostered within and beyond France, Zervos brought a wider world of art to Paris; conversely, through the international circulation of his journal, particularly influential in the US, Germany and Switzerland, he exported a heavily Parisian vision of contemporary art worldwide. Among the different strengths and limitations of his cultural legacy to be considered here: the exceptional importance Zervos accorded to Pablo Picasso and Cubism; his near wilful misrepresentation of genuinely abstract art; and his emphasis upon art-making as an intuitive, quasi-mystical process.