Episode 9 - The 1925 Paris Exhibition, Part 2

"The first impression of the Exhibition is startling. Passing through the silver obelisk-like towers of the Port d’Honneur, one comes at once upon a cubist dream city, or the projection of a possible city in Mars, arisen overnight in the heart of Paris. "

Second in a 3-part series on the 1925 Paris exposition, the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne", that sparked a world-wide explosion of the glamorous and much-loved Art Deco style.   In this episode I discuss how Paris battled to regain its position as style leader of the Western world against the challenge of foreign innovators such as the Deutsche Werkbund, culminating in the 1925 Paris Exposition.

To explore further:

• Article on the Thonet Number 14 chair
• Article on the Deutsche Werkbund
• Article on Peter Brehens, one of the founders of the Werkbund
• Article on the AEG Turbine Hall, one the pioneers of modern factory design
• Article of the 1910 Salon d'Automne
• More photos of the Deutsche Werkbund exhibits at the 1910 Salon d'Automne
• Jean Metzinger's Cubist painting Nu a la cheminee
• Comprehensive article by Arthur Chandler on the 1925 Paris Exhibition
• Photos of the 1925 Paris Exhibition
• Film "Paris a Cinq Jours", ("Paris in 5 Days"), silent comedy from 1925.  Contains actual footage of the 195 Paris expo at 40.49 minute mark

Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com

Photo credit:  Thonet Number 14 Chair, thonet.com.au/products/no-14-vienna/

Transcript

Episode 9: The 1925 Paris Expo, Part 2

Welcome! To Talking Modernism, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents, changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptma

This is the second episode about the 1925 Paris Exposition. I’d originally planned to make this a 2 parter, but I’ve found so many interesting facts about Art Deco and the exposition I’ve decided to extend the discussion across 3 episodes. 

Last episode we saw Paris in 1900 triumphant after the world expo there had placed the city at the forefront of the Art Nouveau movement. This ornate and luxurious style played well to France’s traditional strengths in hand crafted luxury goods, a tradition that stretched back to Louis IV. But industrialisation continued to change the world. And there was one nation perhaps second only to the US at the forefront of this change, and that nation was France’s great strategic rival: Germany. 

Back in episode 3 I described how Germany grew from a somewhat backward collection of kingdoms and duchies in 1870 to become the nation at the forefront of modernity by the eve of WW1. Germany entered the twentieth century at the gallop. Germany, which had only come into existence as a nation in 1871 had transformed, in a scant 40 years from a rural, agricultural society to an urban industrial nation second only to the USA Here again are a few statistics from episode 3 to illustrate. 

• In the early 1870s, Britain produced 4 times as much steel as Germany. By 1914, Germany produced as much steel as Britain, France and Russia combined
• In 1913 the value of Germany’s electrical production was twice that of Britain and almost 10 times that of France. 
• Germany’s exports of electrical equipment were the highest in the world, almost 3 times that of the US.
• In dyestuffs, Germany controlled 90% of the market.
• Between 1890 and 1913, the value of German exports more than tripled 

Initially Germany used imitation, reverse engineering and industrial espionage to catch up with manufacturing leaders such as Britain. Alfred Krupp, head of the huge Essen steel company that bears his name, toured English steelworks to steal their secrets under the alias “Mr Schroop”, a charming Dutch gentleman of independent means with an unusual interest in modern smelting processes. But Germany then innovated to rapidly overtake their rivals, just as the US had in the first half of the 1800s and as Japan would do in the 1970s and also as China is beginning to do today.

Today Germany is fabled for its manufacturing excellence, with brands such as Audi, Porsche, Meile and Braun. If Paris is synonymous with high fashion, then Frankfurt is synonymous with, excellence in industrial design. But at the start of their transformation, German manufactures were synonymous with dodgy knock-offs, low quality consumer goods like knives and furniture that were dumped on foreign markets. And these dodgy goods were often mislabeled as “Made in Sheffield” and the like – Germany at the time broke trade marks and other intellectual property laws with impunity. Indeed Britain introduced a law in 1887 requiring German goods to be marked “Made in Germany” to warn the buying public that they were buying a cheap imitation. 

But Germany was determined to transform, to shift their country from being a source of cheap knock-offs to become the world leader in design and quality. And they did this by re-imagining the relationship between aesthetics and mass production. Applied arts since the and Arts and Crafts movement had held that mass production could not be have aesthetic value. Aesthetics came from ornamentation, and the only good and valid ornamentation  was hand made, craftsmen led. 

But Germany at the turn of the 1900s posed a revolutionary question. What if rather than rejecting mass production, designers instead worked with industry that was rapidly becoming the German nation’s powerhouse, to design products that had a new aesthetic appropriate to the nature of mass production. An aesthetic that rather than seeking to mimic the intricacies of manual craftmanship, would draw its beauty from the elegance of efficient and functional design. An aesthetic that hearkened more to Japanese minimalism that to Gothic or rococo excess.

An early pioneer of this new approach was the German-Austrian cabinet maker Michael Thonet, who in the 1850s invented a process for producing cane and bentwood furniture by steam. In 1859 he introduced the “Number 14 chair”, a masterpiece of design: simple, elegant and efficient, fastened with only 10 screws and 2 nuts. It became the first mass-produced item of furniture to sell a million copies. By 1930 over 30 million had been sold and its still very much in production today. I’ve included a picture on the podcast website, You might not know its name, but no doubt you’ll recognise the chair as soon as you see it.

A series of associations were founded to pursue this new approach. In 1898 the Dresden Workshop for Arts & Crafts was founded. In 1906 they held an exhibition showcasing this new style, and this inspired the larger Deutscher Werkbund that was founded in 1907. The Deutscher Werkbund had the explicit goal of fostering links between German artists,craftsmen and industry to develop a distinct German identity in design and architecture. Its motto was “Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau”, which translates as “from sofa-cushions to city-building’.” Despite having limited membership – by 1914 it it had less than 2,000 members – it was an very active and incredibly influential, shaping and guiding German industrial design until the present, though shut down during the Nazi era. 

Peter Behrens was one of the eleven founders of the Werkbund and he epitomised this new marriage of art and industry. He was employed by the electrical manufacturer AEG as an artistic consultant and was called upon to design everything from the company's logos and typefaces to its product design, he created the world's first corporate identity. In 1909 he designed a radically simple turbine factory of glass and steel for AEG, the pioneer of modern industrial buildings. I’ve provided a link to a picture on the podcast website.

At the turn of the new century, Paris largely ignored the challenge of German applied arts and its new direction. Basking still in the success of the 1900 Paris Expo that had established Art Noveau as a French style, it was confident in the supremacy of its traditional craft workshops under the auspices of the august Academie des Beaux Arts. But in 1910 complacency was s shattered by one of the milestone events of modernism.

The 1910 Salon d’Automne and the triumph of the Deutsche Werkbund

In days gone by, a successful fashion style would have a life of decades. The “empire line” fashion in dresses for instance lasted for about 30 years, from 1790 to 1820. But with modernity the pace of life dramatically quickened and the fashion cycle got shorter. After its explosion at the 1900 Paris Expo, Art Nouveau, especially the French variant, would last scarcely 8 years. By 1909, the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, the Paris gallery that had given its name to the style, would close its doors forever. Design expos at Turin in 1902 , St Louis in 1904 and Munich in 1909 highlighted the fact that tastes were changing yet again. Other countries, Germany but also Austria, Italy and Britain, were demonstrating a new style of applied arts, winning accolades and prizes whilst French exhibits languished, judged as outdated. 

All these expos occurred outside of France, so the more short-sighted French designers and critics were able to ignore this trend. But then in October of 1910 Paris held its Salon d’Automne. This annual exhibition was started in 1903 to highlight the revolution in fine arts that was occurring in turn-of-the-century Paris, showcasing avant-garde art that was being ignored or vilified by the conservative state-sponsored Salon de Paris annual exhibition of art. Hugely influential, the Salon d’Automne had a critical role in launching a number of the key art movements of the 1900s. The 1904 exhibition had showcased the works of Paul Cezanne. The 1907 exhibition had launched the movement known as Fauvism. Indeed the exhibition had named the movement: the room containing paintings in this new style by painters such as Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau, non-naturalist paintings in striking colours, also contained a couple of renaissance-revival style statues by sculptor Albert Marque. A critic of the exhibition remarked on the contrast: "Donatello chez les fauves",  "Donatello among the wild beasts”, and thus the movement was henceforth known as Fauvism. 

The salon of 1910 was not short of innovations either. It featured the first major public exhibition of movement we know as cubism, though the name wasn’t widely adopted until an exhibition the following year. It’s fair to say that critics found the new style challenging. Here is how one critic described a cubist nude by artist Jean Metzinger:

“Metzinger painted a puzzle, cubic and triangular, which after verification, is a naked woman. I managed to discover the head, torso and legs. I had to give up finding arms. This is beyond comprehension.”

But more pertinent to our story, the 1910 Salon also decided to showcase the work of the Deutscher Werkbund. Seven rooms, or ensembles, were displayed, each organised by a different designer. I’ve provided a link to some photos on the podcase website, as well as a picture of Metszinglers puzzle nude. Any illusions that Paris may have still harboured that it was a leader in applied arts were finally dashed. The Werkbund rooms were judged far more advanced than anything France was producing. Original in design, restrained and balanced in decoration, capturing the spirit of the modern machine age yet skilfully incorporating references to historical and vernacular styles. And this was evident not only in the individual pieces but in the harmonious composition of the rooms: the Werkbund designers were able to coordinate their efforts in a way that the French could not. 

Futhermore, by maintaing an emphasis on fine craftsmanship and avoiding mass production, French industry tended to focus on the luxury end of the market and neglected the booming middle class that the industrial revolution had created. As one French politician noted:

“French decorative artists are so ingenious when it comes to the production of a unique piece, were not organised nor equipped to produce current models in unlimited series”. 

This failure of French design had economic consequences. Exports of French decorative goods were plummeting. In 1907 French exported furniture to England worth 2.3m pounds and imported furniture from Britain would 1.7m pounds. By 1911, only 4 years later, the numbers more than reversed: France only exported 1.4m pounds and imported 2.8m pounds, Even the French consumer no longer believed in the primacy of French design.

The other motivation for French reaction with chauvanism, or to put it another way, a strong sense of place. France, the nation for over 200 years a champion of internationalism, with Paris one of the largest immigrant centres in the world , has had regular “moral panics” about maintaining French culture in the face of foreign influence. In the 50s and 60s they were concerned about the influence of American music and cinema. In the 80s and 90s a battle was fought against the spread of McDonalds. And in 1910, the battleground became, weird as it may seem, interior decorating. Critics of the Deutsch Werkbund exhibition in 1910 framed their opposition in teh language of of war. As one commentator on the 1910 exhibition said:

“The commercial Sedan – Sedan was the pivotal defeat of teh French army in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – the commercial Sedan with which we have been threatened for so many years is no longer to be feared – it is here, it is a fait accompli.”

Later, on the eve of the 1925 exhibition, Lucien Dior, Frances Minister for Commerce would summarise

French taste had been law, and the effects of this were felt in both the public coffers and the private accounts of manufacturers, sellers, and artists. All this did not endure. Why? Because all around us, the English, Germans, Belgians, Italians, Scandinavians, and even the Americans themselves reacted, and sought to create for themselves – for better or worse – an original art, a novel style corresponding to the changing needs manifested by an international clientele. During this time, what did we do, apart from a few valiant efforts by an isolated few? Nothing, except to copy our own old-fashioned styles. 

 The shock of the 1910 exhibition galvinised the French into action. A broad coalition of designers, manufacturers, department stores and government, led in particular by the Societe des Artistes Decoratuers, SAD, the Society of Decorative Artists, decided a national program to revitalise France’s decorative arts industry and establish a modern distinctive French style. New design schools and training programs were organised, mirroring many aspects of the Deutsche Werkbund. Networks linking designers, manufacturers and retailers were set up. And a new exposition would be held to show to the world that Paris had once more reclaimed the city’s traditional role as the style leader of the western world: the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, or the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts

The 1925 Paris Exhibition

The new exhibition was orginally planned for 1915. But man proposes and God disposes. Delayed first by WW1 and later by post-war shortages, the Expo was finally held in 1925. Unlike the wide-ranging Paris expo of 1900 , which had sought to "range over all forms of thought" with exhibitions of industrial, scientific and artistic products, the 1925 expo would focus only on the decorative arts: fashion, furniture, jewellery, graphic design, film and architecture. And the expo would showcase the modern, as was made plain by the opening paragraph of the guidebook to potential exhibitors:

Works admitteded to the Exhibition must be those of modern inspiration and of genuine originality, executed and presented by artists, artisans manufacturers, model makers and publishers in keeping with the demands of modern industial and decorative art. Copies, imitations and counterfeits of antique styles are rigorously excluded.

And the exposition would be a showcase for France. Some 20 countries., mainly from Europe. had pavilions at the Paris expo . After much debate Germany was not invited though former foe Austria was, as was the Soviet Union, even though France had yet not formally recognised the new country. The US was invited but chose not to attend because, as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, explained , there was no modern art in the United States. But 2/3 of the site was occupied by France.

If you want to see what the exhibition looked like, I’ve included links to some photo galleries on the podcast web. Unfortunately I can’t find any colour photography. If any listeners know of any, please send me an email, I’d love to include them, And virtually no film seems to exist, except for a sequence I found after much googling in a 1925 silent French comedy about a group on a package tour visiting the exposition, entitled “Paris in 5 Days”. I’ve included a link to that on the podcast website. It’s very amusing, worth checking out if you want an old fashioned laugh, and has some good footage of the expo. 

The main site of the exhibition was concentrated in the same general area as the 1900 Paris expo but was half its size, covering 55 hectares centered on the Grand and Petite Palais, and stretching from the Place de Concorde across the bridge Pont Alexandre III to Les Invalides . Visitors entered the site through were thirteen gateways, each designed by a different architect. 

And once inside, a cashed-up vistor could immediately start shopping Unashamedly a showcase for French luxury retail, the expo resembled nothing so much as a large open-air luxury shopping mall. In addition to the pavillions of various nations and numerous official French pavillions, there were gorgeous pavillions by 5 major department stores: Galaries Lafayette, Bon Marche, Printemps, La Samaritaine and Grands Magasins du Louvre. Lalique crysal also had a pavillion, outside which was a 15m high crystal fountain that was one of exhibition highlights. The couturier Paul Poiret – I’ll talk much more about him in the next episode – displayed his wares in 3 barges on the Seine. At night the Eifel tower was lit by 4 hundred thousand coloured lightbulbs that spelt out in in giant letters : “Citroen” - the car company was a major sponsor.

The Pont Alexandre connecting the 2 halves of the site had erected upon it 40 luxury boutiques – small shops when a designer could show of a limited range of products, artfully dispayed in the large vitrine or shop window. This was a style of shop that Paris had pioneered just a few years earlier. The shops on this rue des boutiques were all devoted to fashion: couturiers, furriers, jewellers and perfumiers. Whilst other countries like Germany might challenge Paris in furnishings, architecture and industrial design, the city had remained the unchallenged leader in women’s fashion. 

In the last episode I talked about how Charles Worth and the House of Worth had invented many of the conventions of haute coutoure in the late 1800s. Paris’ reputation as the women’s fashion centre of the world had only increased in the following years. In Anita Loos’ 1925 book “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: the Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady” – it was made into a movie with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in 1953 – the heroine Loreli Lee assesses that “London is Really Nothing” but “Paris is Devine”, based largely on the city’s shopping possibilities:

And when a girl walks around and reads all the signs with all the famous historical names it really makes you hold your breath. So when we stood at the corner of a place called the Place Vendome, if you turn your back on a monument they have in the middle and look up, you can see none other than the Coty’s sign.

The monument in the Place Vendome that distracted from the view of the Coty’s sign is the famous Austerlitz column with the statue of Napoleon at the top. 

Art Deco – the style of 1925

Th 1925 expo was the culmination of a project to associate Paris with a distinctive modern style that had broad appeal. And by most measures, it succeeded brilliantly. American critic Helen Appleton Read visited the 1925 expo and wrote:

The first impression of the Exhibition is startling. Passing through the silver obelisk-like towers of the Port d’Honneur, one comes at once upon a cubist dream city, or the projection of a possible city in Mars, arisen overnight in the heart of Paris. 

Working independently, the expo’s myriad designers, organisations and countries coordinated solely by the expo’s injunction to be “of modern inspiration and of genuine originality” had nonetheless managed, by and large and with a couple of important exceptions that I’ll discuss in the nexte pisode, to display a consistent new style. As one observer wrote, the designers had:

while working individually and independently, arrived at a style which is homogeneous as well as characteristic, and which embodies the same principles as the (pavillion) architecture … a certain masculinity, a soberness of ornamentation and a dependence upon effects produced by proportion and richness of material rather than by elaborate carving or applied ornament.

Paris had revealed the style that we now know as Art Deco. Interestingly, the term Art Deco was not really invented until the 1960s. The same way we don’t have an all-encompassing term for the decorative style we use today: it will be for future commentators to look back, summarise and decide a name. Back in the day, the French tended to call the new style “the style of 1925”. In Britain and Australia it was generally called “jazz” style. The term Art Deco was first popularised in France in 1966 when a retrospective exhibition of the style held was held at The Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. In 1968 the British art historian Bevis Hillier published the first major academic book on the subject “Art Deco of the 1920s and 30s”, and in 1971 he curated a major exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts called “The World of Art Deco”.

The Paris expo may not have invented this new style but in bringing together so many examples in one place it brought it to wthe world’s attention and sparked a worldwide craze. The expo ran for 7 months between May and November and attracted 15 million visitors from around the world. Economies were recovering after the disruption of WW1. This was the era of the Great Gatsby, les annes folle, the crazy years as the French called it. The new style, luxurious, liberated and up-to-date, suited the times perfectly, 

 On that triumphant note, lets leave our podcast for now. If you have any comments or suggestions you’d like to share,or even just to let me know if you’re enjoying the series, please email me at talkingmodernism@gmail.com And join me next time when I’ll conclude the story of the 1925 Paris Expo, and describe how the worlds of fashion, commerce and the artistic avant-garde worked together in the tumultuous opening decades of the twentieth century to create the Art Deco style. I look forward to speaking to you then.