World Fairs & Expositions
Paris Exposition Internationale, 1937
The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne took place in Paris between May and November 1937. This was arguably the most spectacular and certainly the most politically contentious of the great Parisian exhibitions that repeatedly transformed the city’s physical environment through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Centred on the new Palais de Chaillot and the adjacent Eiffel Tower, itself a legacy of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the 1937 Exposition was intended to celebrate ‘the arts and technologies of modern life’ but was intensely politicised from the outset. Organised during the socialist-led Popular Front and in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, the Exposition became an architectural battle-ground as fascist and communist regimes sought to promote their rival ideologies through their national exhibition spaces. The failure to complete a projected Phare du Monde, a giant concrete column twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, symbolised the failure of the liberal international order this edifice sought to promote, while the aggressive juxtaposition of the towering Nazi and Soviet pavilions, designed by Albert Speer and Boris Iofan respectively, anticipated the devastating geopolitical and military conflicts to come. The Italian pavilion, which celebrated Mussolini’s fascist regime, and the Spanish Republic’s exhibition hall, which was filled with works by sympathetic artists, including Picasso’s Guernica, exemplified the same ideological conflict, played out in less bombastic terms in two rather elegant buildings that reflected otherwise similar modernist sensibilities. The understated British pavilion on the banks of the Seine, by contrast, included a photograph of Neville Chamberlain on a fishing holiday.
Further information:
In addition to Philip Medicus’s colour film of the Exposition, see these Pathé newsreels, with English commentary, showing the exposition under construction from an airship: https://youtu.be/tjR_qo_r8To and the opening ceremony: https://youtu.be/s6A1WJzhYB8
For a commentary, see for instance Arthur Chandler, “Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques Dans la Vie Moderne” (Expanded and revised from World's Fair magazine, Volume VIII, Number 1, 1988): http://www.arthurchandler.com/paris-1937-exposition/
For a wealth of images of the Exposition, see Chris Mullen’s collection relating to Paris 1937: http://www.fulltable.com/vts/p/pcc/zz/menun.htm
Chicago World's Fair, 1933
One of the most popular and visible spaces of internationalism were world fairs and exhibitions. From their origins in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, world fairs were showcases for political and technological progress, but were often also spaces for overt displays of colonial power and stereotypical representations of various peoples. In the interwar years these fairs continued apace and embraced new modernist architecture and art. Chicago World's Fair, held at the centenary of the city’s founding and amidst the turmoil of great depression, was a celebration of American industrial and technological innovation. As ideas of progress and internationalism seemed increasingly distant, the fair marked a brave assertion emergence of the ‘American Century’ and gave some glimpse to the global role it would later come to play.
Further information:
Picturing a Century of Progress: https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/picturing-a-century-of-progress-the-1933-34-chicago-world's-fair
Pageant of the Pacific
World fairs were also spaces through which to fashion new representations of internationalism. The example here, Plate IV (Economy of the Pacific) taken from the Mexican painter and caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias’s (1904-1957) Pageant of the Pacific, offers a case in point. Covarrubias’ six widely disseminated, illustrated maps of the Pacific basin were made as mural decorations for the Pacific House, the theme building of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco 1939-40, and stood out as one of the fair’s must see attractions. They were later exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. California-based geographers, such as Carl Sauer, advised Covarrubias on the maps which offered a reoriented conception of internationalism driven by America’s increasingly global role. The murals were informed as much by artistic sentiment as the depiction of geographical features, however, and they derive their value as pictorial guides to the diverse cultures and opportunities of the pacific world.
Treasure Island
Treasure Island was an artificial island created in the San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Among other things, the fair was a celebration of the city’s two newly constructed bridges, the San-Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (opened in 1936) and the eponymous Golden Gate Bridge (opened in 1937). The theme of the exhibition was ‘Pageant of the Pacific’ with the dramatic centrepiece of the fair being ‘The Tower of the Sun’, an 80-foot statue of the goddess of the Pacific ocean, Pacifica. The choice of San Francisco was a conscious effort to demonstrate an enlarged and strengthened sense of America’s global role, one which reached out across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As President Franklin D Roosevelt said at the exhibition’s opening ceremonies: ‘Washington is remote from the Pacific. San Francisco stands at the doorway’.
Further information:
Video of the fair: https://youtu.be/dqXT2HB8PM8
Palais Mondial, Brussels
’By virtue of their size, cost, and transport connections and investment the sites of World Fairs and exhibitions have important afterlives. Sometimes they are reused for later world fairs (as in the case of Paris), headquarters for international organisations like the United Nations (as in the case of New York), or become large educational or cultural sites (as is the case of Exhibition Road in London). World Fairs were not only major international events therefore, but many sites had curiously internationalist afterlives. This was the case of the grand buildings of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, first constructed for the Brussels National Exhibition of 1880 and then greatly expanded for the International Exhibition of 1897. By the 1920s these buildings had been repurposed as the ‘Palais Mondial’, a major coordinating centre of interwar internationalism under the Belgium internationalists Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine that was home to the ‘International Centre’, or ‘Mundaneum’, encompassing an international museum, conference centre, documentation centre and Union of International Associations. The venue hosted a number of international conferences and events, including the second meeting of the 1921 Pan-African Congress.
Further information:
Website of the Mundaneum, since 1993 housed in Mons, Belgium: http://www.mundaneum.org/en