Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937)
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The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life) was held in 1937 in Paris, France. The Musée de l'Homme was created at this occasion.
Exhibitions
Among the most notable exhibitions of the fair was the Spanish Pavilion. The fair took place during the Spanish Civil War; the pavilion of the embattled Second Spanish Republic included Pablo Picasso's famous painting "Guernica", a depiction of the horrors of war.
Two of the other notable pavilions were those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the German and the Soviet pavilions directly across each other. Hitler had desired to withdraw from participation, but his architect Albert Speer, who had by coincidence seen the Soviet pavilion plans while visiting Paris, convinced him to participate after all, showing Hitler his plans for the German pavilion.
Plagued by delay, at the opening day of the exhibition, only the German and the Soviet pavilions were completed. This, as well as the fact that the two pavilions faced each other, turned the exhibition into somewhat of a personal competition between the two great ideological rivals.
Five hundred feet high, Speer's pavilion was completed by a tall tower crowned with the symbols of the Nazi state: an eagle and the swastika. The pavilion was conceived as a monument to "German pride and achievement". It was to broadcast to the world that a new and powerful Germany had a restored sense of national pride. At night, the pavilion was illuminated by floodlights. Speer later revealed in his autobiographies that he had had a clandestine look at the plans for the Soviet pavilion, and had designed the German pavilion to represent a bulwark against Communism.
Vera Mukhina designed the large figurative sculpture on the Soviet pavilion for the exhibition, whose architect was Boris Iofan. The grand building was topped with a large momentum-exerting statue, of a male worker and a female peasant, their hands thrusting a hammer and a sickle together, in a symbol of communist union.
See also
- Nazi architecture
- Stalinist architecture
- Streamline Moderne architecture
