Monday 16 May 2011

Paris 1937 again


The Paris exhibition of 1937 has appeared here in the past and today we offer two contemporary graphic efforts to visualise the great event. For Paris this would be the last in a long sequence of international exhibitions going back to 1855 and would conclude on a sour note with the major participants locked in sullen competition while the spirit of international friendship and co-operation lay mortally wounded. It closed in November 1937; in less than two years most of Europe would be at war. These examples understandably attempt to strike an optimistic note employing graphic idioms from the previous decade. The new graphics of the late Thirties reflected the new totalitarianism in harsher, heavier and more rectilinear forms not on show here.



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