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Paris-Guernica 1937
Thierry Beistingel

A World’s Fair was held in Paris in 1937, and a brochure cataloguing the different national pavilions there was published to mark the occasion. In full color, it was meant to show off state-of-the-art photographic-printing techniques, to bear witness to the modernity whose praises the concert of nations was singing at the time. A few months before the inauguration, bombs were dropped on Guernica, turning this Spanish city into the painful symbol of a Europe that would soon fall prey to its demons.
This account is divided between the 1937 brochure L’Exposition internationale des arts et techniques appliqués à la vie moderne (The World’s Fair of Arts and Techniques Applied to Modern Living), following the photographer in charge of making the catalogue, and another photographic gaze, this one belonging to Dora Maar, who immortalized Picasso’s work in his studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins, by the Seine in Paris. In the secret of this studio he created a canvas whose aesthetics were like a slap in the face of the catalogue’s falsely bright colors.
Guernica, face-to-face with the edifices of National-Socialist realism, prototypes of Nazi art, and those of Socialist realism, prototypes of Stalinist art, which were both present at the Fair. Two gazes that this account confronts, to make the complex relationship between art and politics almost palpable. This parallel editing technique is like a documentary of our own modernity, of our Techniques Applied to Modern Life.  
The book honors the 70th anniversaries of both the Paris World’s Fair and Guernica.

Paris-Guernica 1937 -
  • Available material :
    Finished copy

  • Buchet/Chastel
  • Libella-Maren Sell littérature française
  • Publication date : 08/03/2007
  • Size : 13,5 x 21 cm, 160 p., 18,25 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-35004-071-4
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