This elegant and theoretically informed book, illustrated with
forty-five photographs, explores the cultural significance of six
exhibitions or new museum installations, all opening in Paris
between mid-1937 and early 1938: the commercially oriented world's
fair titled L'Exposition Internationale des Art et Techniques; the
historical Musee des Monuments Francais; the ethnographic Musee de
l'Homme; two massive art retrospectives, one sponsored by the state
of France and the other by the municipality of Paris; and
L'Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme.
James D. Herbert capitalizes on the proximity of these disparate
exhibits to show how they competed with and yet also complemented
one another in visually rendering the full scope of human
accomplishment through time and across the globe. In this task,
Herbert argues, they both succeeded and failed in interesting and
productive ways. He asserts that the exhibitions projected and, in
a sense, created (created precisely through the act of projection)
the real world that they ostensibly only represented.
In fact, Herbert argues, the exhibitions developed a particular
sense of French national identity -- one that, in managing to be at
the same moment both inwardly focused and beneficently expansive,
would present a vivid contrast to the growing German nationalism of
the Third Reich. His epilogue takes a final look at these issues
from the perspective of Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee. A
ground-breaking work in cultural history, Paris 1937, with its
insightful examination of objects from a variety of fields, is a
pioneering text in the field of visual studies.
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