Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition

About the Book

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.

About the Author :

James D. Herbert is Professor and Chair, Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics.

Review :
"A critical perspective which is both specifically original and consistent with recent studies of Universal Exhibitions and of the strategic design of the modern Museum... Even those not entirely comfortable with the ramifications of the 'unseen gods' figured in the displays of the 1930s will learn much from the detailed analysis of those representations and their intersecting semiotics and ideologies... It is not merely its 45 fascinating archival photographs which leave one with the sense of the 'visual command' ... which the author himself brings to his subject. To look at 1937 through his eyes, and then across to Eiffel's negating panoptic tower, is to ensure that the view from the Trocadero will never be quite the same again."-Journal of European Studies "In his thought-provoking and ambitious new book, James D. Herbert offers a penetrating analysis of... the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques and five contemporaneous museum installations and exhibitions that either complemented it or parodied it... The strength of Herbert's study is ... to demonstrate how, taken together, the exhibitions in fact presented a surprisingly cohesive and complementary series of images... In its diligent research and thoughtful exposition across disparate fields, Paris 1937 is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of modern exhibition history. Herbert's book should have an impact not just on the critical examination of installations but more broadly on how we discuss the complex relationship between images in the public sphere and the formation of identity."-Adam Jolles, Modernism/modernity "Herbert has ... placed his historical narrative within a poststructuralist synthesis of his own devising that is ... brilliant... Read as a historical narrative that presents valuable insights in somewhat unexpected ways, it is enormously satisfying and deserves attention."-Jerry Cullum, Art in America "Jim Herbert has written a moving and often poetic reflection on the international exhibition of arts and industries held in Paris in 1937."-Keith Moxey, author of The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History "Paris 1937 is a cultural history focused on a particular space in Paris at the end of the 1930s in which fine art and the spectacle of culture were mobilized to do a certain kind of job. Herbert has an almost insatiable appetite for research. He is a historian who has found a way to put theory to use in a manner that is fully integrated with the text. His approach opens up avenues of engagement with new problems and issues in art and cultural history."-Fred Orton, University of Leeds "Herbert's study is informed by astute critical analysis of texts and images associated with the diversity of Parisian exhibition during the wondrous, ominous year of 1937. His intellectual range opens the reader to one insight after another. Herbert shows himself to be as familiar with the medievalism of 1937 as with its Marxism, and, what is more, knows how to connect the two. This account of modern French culture at a critical moment is comprehensive while concise, both remarkably instructive and remarkably witty. It will be remembered."-Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and Director, Center for the Study of Modernism, University of Texas