Paris 1937

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 Musée des Monuments Français; the ethnographic Musée 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 Surréalisme.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 Orphée. 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.

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., 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., 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.

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.