All text reproduced from World's Fair magazine, Volume VIII, Number 3, Copyright 1988, World's Fair, Inc.
Expanded and revised version January 2000, by Arthur Chandler.
THE ARTS OF LIVING
Pierre Patout's spectacular
Entrées Monumentales de la Concorde
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Once inside the gates, the visitor could sample
the delights of Art Deco. Unlike the previous universal expositions, the 1925
exposition made no heavy intellectual or moral demands on the visitor. Peace
and Progress, the twin themes of all the Parisian expositions universelles,
might have been implicit in some of the individual works of art; but the fair
itself was staged with the frank motive of re-establishing France as the arbiter
of taste and fashion in the post-war world. In the past, said Lucien Dior,
"French taste was law." 4 The
goal of this exposition was not to promote the well-being of the human race,
but to bring the aesthetic values of human race back under the hegemony of
Paris.
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It was the hope of the exposition organizers that the fair would bring about
a truly new "modern" style. Paul Géraldy, writing for L'Illustration,
noted that the term "modern" had been so widely and variously misappropriated
by any and every group of artists that the word was falling out of favor.
Part of the blame he placed on the small expositions that had taken place
during the first decades of the twentieth century. There had been a Franco-Belgian
exposition of fashion in 1922, a Spanish exposition of furniture and interior
Decoration in 1923, an ambitious French show of high fashion and luxury products
in New York in 1924 – plus a host of even smaller events which Géraldy
felt were only confusing the attempt to define a truly modern style:
The effect of these little expositions,
for about the last twenty years, has been to present us with a confused
picture: so many bizarre attempts, so many extravagant ensembles,
so much absurd furniture, so much outrageous Decor, that the public
could make but little sense out of the disorder.
5
Examples of furniture and interior decoration in the new "modern" style
The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs
et Industriels Modernes was supposed to bring together the nations of
the world and to show, if not quite a unified front, at least some sense of
a developing common aesthetic among the practitioners of decorative art and
architecture. However, many nations chose not to participate. The United States,
Canada, Mexico, all of Central and South America, were absent.6
Germany, of course, was not invited. For many nations, the prospect of devoting
so much effort and expense in the wake of a world war must have seemed frivolous.
But for those nations that did choose to participate, the exposition could
be viewed as an attempt to find some common ground of unity after the tragic
and divisive war.
NOTES
5 Paul Géraldy, "L'Architecture Vivante," in L'Illustration,
June, 1925, n.p.
6 It is interesting to note that the space originally reserved for the United
States was subsequently given to Japan
7 Quoted in Frank Scarlett and Marjorie Townley, Arts Décoratifs:
A Personal Recollection of the Paris Exhibition (London, 1975) page 78
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