Paris Exhibition Research Articles

PORODICA FIALA: POSLOVNI USPON I UČEŠĆE NA MEĐUNARODNIM I DOMAĆIM IZLOŽBAMA

The thematic scope of the work focuses on the rise of the Fiala family from Kragujevac, leather industrialists, with a broader perimeter of the overall economic development of the Kingdom of Serbia after the Berlin Congress. At the same time, it emphasizes the industrial rise as the cornerstone of the overall economic and social flywheel of the youngest member of the European family of states at the time. The emergence of commercial and economic patriotism at the global level of the epoch, dispossessing the previous classical, historical, cultural, and military- political, is specially reviewed in this paper. How did Serbia, newly restored and with recent independence, navigate through the habitus of a different context that imposed a sophisticated technical and qualitative natural product as the most meaningful lever for establishing and elevating national identity?The international exhibitions unmistakably indicate that Serbia, in the period after the Berlin Congress and until before the Balkan Wars, independently took part and achieved a series of successes. Serbia won medals, awards, and diplomas, in segments concerning total economic production. That was why the world exhibitions in Paris, London, and Turin from 1889 to 1911, were most in focus. In that epoche, the industry represented the backbone of the economy in the leading part of the world. The industrialization of Serbia was presented through the rise of the Fiala family and their leather factory in Kragujevac and their participation in non-world fairs also. The entrepreneurial family originated from the most significant Serbian industrial city, where the industry started by relocating the Topolivnica from Belgrade in 1851. The story of the Fiala family is the story of how Serbia, a primarily agricultural country and even lagging in that segment, nevertheless was catching up with the most developed countries in the world.

The Theatre of Exhibitions: Czechoslovakia at the International Exhibition in Paris, 1937

Abstract How can an exhibition designer engage the visitor at a world’s fair who has already spent hours walking around the grounds, visiting other attractions and countless national pavilions? This question drove many theoretical and practical considerations of exhibition design during the interwar period and preoccupied many designers and artists. As a very active participant in world’s fairs at this time, Czechoslovakia established an intricate system of presenting its material production and cultural prowess which included careful design of the exterior of its pavilion as well as its interior. Using the Czechoslovak pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, 1937, as a case study, this article examines how Czech designers developed their own original ideas about exhibition design informed by other disciplines. It offers a reading of exhibition design in parallel with stage design and claims that the two shared many techniques, aimed at attracting audiences. It stresses, on the one hand, the affiliation between the two design areas and on the other, the original contribution of designers from Czechoslovakia to the development of exhibition design as a self-sufficient field in the interwar period.

Аrhitektura v izkustvoto—izkustvo v arhitekturata

<i>Аrhitektura v izkustvoto—izkustvo v arhitekturata</i>

The View From Here: Contemporary Perspectives from Senegal

The View From Here: Contemporary Perspectives from Senegal

Exhibition as Art Historical Space: The 1933 Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris

The 1933 Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris, the first large-scale Chinese art show in France, played a critical role in establishing the category of “modern Chinese painting” in early twentieth-century Europe. Close visual and textual analysis reveals three factors that shaped the exhibition: the shifting international politics between France, Japan, and China; the complex social network among Chinese artists; and the personal vision and aspiration of the exhibition’s curator. It was through the interaction and competition among different agents and institutions that the category of modern Chinese painting was created.

ІВАН ПУЛЮЙ ТА ВІДКРИТТЯ Х-ПРОМЕНІВ

On January 5, 1896, the Austrian newspaper Die Presse published an article entitled “A Sensational Discovery”. It was dedicated to the discovery of X-rays made on November 8, 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Having taken into account the contribution of other scientists, the precondition of the given epochal, yet unexpected, discovery was, first and foremost, the work of the Ukrainian scientist Ivan Puluj. It was Puluj who laid the foundation for X-ray science. He explained the nature of X-rays, discovered that they can ionize atoms and molecules, and defined the place of X-ray emergence and their distribution in space. In 1881, Puluj constructed a cathode lamp (“Puluj’s tube”) which was fundamentally a new type of light source. In the same year, in recognition of this discovery, Puluj received an award at the International Exhibition in Paris. Investigating the processes in cathode-ray tubes, Ivan Puluj set the stage for two ground-breaking discoveries in physics, namely X-rays and electrons. Puluj used his cathode lamp in medicine as a source of intense X-rays which proved to be highly efficient. The exact date of the first X-ray images received by Puluj remains unknown. High-quality photographs of the hand of an eleven-year-old girl, taken on January 18, 1896, are preserved. Multiple X-ray images clearly visualized pathological changes in the examined structures (fractures, calluses, tuberculous bone lesions). High-quality images were obtained by means of the anticathode in the design of Puluj’s lamp, which was the first in the world. The image of the whole skeleton of a stillborn child (published on April 3, 1896 in The Photogram) is considered to be the starting point of using X-rays in anatomy.

Recognition (to the 175-th anniversary of the birth of V. V. Dokuchaev)

The article is dedicated to the assessment and the recognition of the merits of V.V. Dokuchaev in different periods. We have divided the stages of the evaluation into three periods, the boundaries of which are taken by the memorable dates since the birth of Dokuchaev (100, 150, 175 years). The recognition of Dokuchaev's merits in each period took different forms and depended on the subject under assessment (what was assessed) and the evaluating subject (who made an assessment). The first period is based on the perception of his contemporaries. In the history of natural science, it is hardly possible to find any other scientist, whose works so seamlessly combined theoretical research with its practical application. Dokuchaev's scientific achievements were highly appreciated in Russia and abroad (gold medal of the International Geographical Congress in Paris, special gratitude from the Imperial Free Economic Society, full Makariev Prize of the Imperial Free Economic Society, full Makariev Prize of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Grand Prix of the World Exhibition in Paris and others). The high state recognition of Dokuchaev is evidenced by the presence of the orders of St. Stanislav and St. Anna. The second period of recognition is associated with the triumph of the scientist's ideas, which were almost completely realized in Russia: a network of research and educational institutions and experimental stations were created, large-scale soil research was carried out, a plan for the transformation of nature was implemented. During this period, events were organized that included: the installation of a monument and a memorial plaque in St. Petersburg, the establishment of a gold medal and an award named after V.V. Dokuchaev, the establishment of grants in universities, the creation of the Central Soil Museum named after V.V. Dokuchaev. The third period is rather a tribute to the scientific merits of the scientist. The highest award of the International Union of Soil Scientists is established (2002); a documentary film dedicated to the 165-th anniversary of the birth of the scientist is released; exhibitions are organized on memorable dates. As recognition of the merits in the creation of a scientific school of fundamental soil science, a scientific conference “Docuchaev conference for young scientists” is organized and held annually.

Auguste Fabre and the Construction of Tile Vaults in France. The Industrialization of a Traditional Technique

ABSTRACT Auguste Fabre was a French contractor specialized in the construction of masonry vaults. He founded his company in 1896 and patented different systems of light and economic vaults, among them one for tile vaults. Fabre built thousands of vaults in France, Belgium and Algeria, some of them of great importance, such as the dome of the Petit Palais for the international exhibition in Paris in 1900, or the dome of the Congo Museum in Tervuren (Belgium). Historicism was a breeding ground for the construction of vaults, however, there is scarce technical documentation about them in the journals of the time. This paper explains the work of Auguste Fabre, his patents and some of his buildings, focusing in particular on the construction of tile vaults

Day of Russian Culture — National Holiday of Russian Abroad

This article is devoted to the Day of Russian culture which was the national festival of Russian emigration and became the symbol of spiritual unification of the emigration. Russian emigration addressing to the national cultural sources found the way to preserve its identity as well as to bring up younger generations in the spirit of patriotic consciousness and involvement in the spiritual life of Russia and its rich culture. Public character of the festival organization whereas emigrant community played the leading role in the process was its fundamental feature. The ability of Russian emigration for amateur talent activities manifested itself to the utmost throughout the process of organizing and holding Pushkin celebrations in 1937. Pushkin and His Epoch exhibition in Paris was one of the major events of Pushkin jubilee year. The exhibition became the milestone event not only for Russian emigration but for international cultural society as well.

ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫЕ ВЫСТАВКИ В ПАРИЖЕ XVIII ВЕКА

For the first time in Russian historiography the article collects and systematizes information concerning art exhibitions in Paris in the eighteenth century, which makes it possible to identify the cultural and social significance of that phenomenon. Exposition activity is seen as a new and very significant phenomenon of cultural life at that time, a symptom of the democratization of art, which entailed the development of mass reflection on the role and significance of creative work in the form of a well-developed art criticism. A study of sources such as the minutes of the Royal Academy and the collection of critical reviews of art exhibitions (Deloigne’s Collection) at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris allowed seeing and appreciating the immediate reactions of contemporaries to metropolitan exhibitions of various scales. A wide variety of the public, as well as the renewed role of the viewer, overturned the idea of art as a luxury available only to the elite, and turned the visual arts in France into an asset of the nation.

The invention of the Swiss house: engineers, ethnographers and artists to the discovery of the Alpine vernacular construction

“At the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, Switzerland presented itself to the world by exhibiting an imaginary synthetic village, making the conflicting features of the various Cantons – which for a few decades gathered under the flag of the Confederation – the founding elements of its national identity. These features were based on the cultural core of the “idem Alpine feeling” defined by the primitive cantons of Alemannic language, Catholic religion, and mountain economy. Not being able to express an authentic image by drawing on the nation’s historicized heritage, the focus is on popular architecture. The Alpine House has built and nurtured a resilient narrated “myth” which, in its architectural form of “chalet” typical of the Bernese Oberland, has helped feed a generalist image of considerable pro-motional and commercial success for Switzerland and its industry. In the twentieth century, during the industrial growth of the nation, campaigns of survey and inventory of the rural and bourgeois “heritage” tried to scientifically systematize the heterogeneous disciplinary approaches that had undertaken the interpretation of the Alpine house in the previous century. Social, economic, and cultural functions are the raison d’être of the vernacular construction and are expressed in the lexicon of typological, constructive, and decorative elements. The specific linguistic and cultural affiliations translate not only into different materials, techniques, and forms of construction but also into different settlement models in the territory. An unwavering mythology has been built and, paradoxically, the national identity has been modelled on the assumption that Germans are “assemblers” of logs, and Latins are “builders” who use stone.”

Ethics and Responsibilities Preserving Traditional Balinese Architectural Values in the Global Era

Abstract: Bali island has become a world tourist destination since the colonial period. Bali even almost made to be a "living museum" through Baliseering program by the Dutch Colonial Government in the 1930s, with the pretext of protecting Balinese culture. The proscenium stage was introduced for the Balinese architectural performance venue. At the Colonial Tourism Exhibition in Paris in 1931, the Dutch Colonial Government introduced a unique Balinese architecture. The Balinese ethnographic museum was also built by combining the architectural concepts of Pura and Puri in Bali. After Indonesia’s independence in 1945, tourism activities are continued by the Balinese Regional Government. To protect the values of traditional architecture in the midst of the tourism development in the global era, the Balinese Regional Government made special regulations related to ethics and the preservation of traditional Balinese architecture. This article discusses the ethics and responsibilities of architects or interior designers in preserving local geniuses of traditional Balinese architecture in the global era. Primarily, the study focuses on the aesthetic qualities of local genius and creativity, combined with construction technology, to capture local characters and avoid cultural homogenization.

Imperial Myth as a National Idea: Explicit and Hidden Meanings of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris

The article presents an analysis of the colonial exhibition of 1931 in the context of the metamorphosis of the colonial idea in France. After the First World War, the difficulties in managing the colonies were increasingly felt in France. The French political class hoped to give new vitality to the national consciousness, which was threatened by various social-revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, through the reform of colonial policy. The colonial exhibition of 1931 became the apogee of imperial propaganda in the metropolis and a symbol of unity between the Third Republic with its colonies. Its success was associated with the extent to which the colonial idea penetrated French society and with the stabilization of the mother country&amp;apos;s relations with her colonies between the two world wars. The colonial discourse of the 1931 exhibition was an apology for republican centrism expressed through the firm positioning of racial superiority, the demonstration of the validity of the ideals of progress inevitably brought about by colonization, and the dominance of French values. The author demonstrates that the new political situation that developed after the Great War contributed to the achievement of colonial consolidation, on the part of the majority of parties and, mainly, through the deployment of the state propaganda machine. The colonies and the colonial question marked the outlines, the brushstrokes, as it were, of a national union. This union between the national and the colonial, the nation and the empire, was twofold. Between the two world wars, national and colonial issues became logically interlinked and interdependent. The author concludes that the 1931 exhibition propagated the idea of the imperial order through the display and presentation of idealized indigenous cultures represented by a variety of artifacts, fine arts, and architecture. The 1931 exhibition became a general imperial holiday, and was intended to serve the unity between the imperial centre and the colonies. It became an important tool of imperial construction, a fairly effective means of broadcasting the official imperial ideology, and a metaphor for the colonial republic, which embodied the cultural, social, and mental characteristics of the imperial nation; its hidden meaning was directed against the growing ideas of colonial nationalism and resistance.

Alexander Rodchenko about Paris. From «Letters home».

The article is devoted to the analysis of the letters of A.M. Rodchenko, which were written by him in Paris during the preparation of the pavilion of the Soviet Union for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. The «new Soviet man&amp;apos;s» perception of the culture of the Western world is being studied. Letters help to comprehend not only the European, but also the Soviet world of the period of the 1920s. December 5, 2021 will be the anniversary of the birth of Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko: 130 years! The round date, as well as the growing interest in everyday history, is due to the relevance of this article. The novelty is the interpretation of this source in the context of Alexander Rodchenko&amp;apos;s views on Paris. Researchers turn to letters exclusively to study the Paris exhibition, bypassing Rodchenko&amp;apos;s most interesting assessments and opinions regarding the alien and incomprehensible Western world. Rodchenko visited France for the first time and was extremely dissatisfied with it. He was uncomfortable, lonely, trying to distract himself from the alien world, he almost daily wrote letters to his wife Varvara Stepanova in Russia. The time frame of the Paris letters written by him dates from March 19 to June 14. Rodchenko stayed in France for about three months, having written 52 letters during this time. In 1927, they were partially published in the journal «Novy LEF». Their full publication took place only in 2014. I would like to note that the originals of the documents, apparently, are kept in the family&amp;apos;s personal archive. For publication , they were provided by A. Lavrentiev, grandson of Rodchenko and Stepanova.

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Since the days of her infamous exhibition in early nineteenth-century London and Paris and her posthumous dissection at the hands of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, the story of Sarah Baartman returned to public attention in 1985 with the publication of two ground-breaking articles by Stephen Jay Gould and Sander L. Gilman, who both remarked that Baartman’s remains were still on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, newly elected President Nelson Mandela visited President Franc...

Objetos em trânsito - Amélia Cavalcanti e o colecionismo do século XIX

A coleção Marquesa de Cavalcanti, mantida no Museu Volkenkunde, em Leiden, na Holanda, é um dos registros mais antigos da existência de objetos brasileiros neste museu. Faz parte de uma coleção mais ampla criada para a Exposição Antropológica Brasileira, realizada em 1882, e para a Exposição Universal de Paris, realizada em 1889. O foco principal deste artigo são os itinerários dessa coleção, desde suas primeiras exposições no Brasil e em Paris até a coleção Volkenkunde em Leiden. Apesar do desafio colocado pela ausência de documentação para entender a “vida social” dos objetos, acreditamos que a investigação dos itinerários das coleções e a análise das diferentes relações sociais inscritas nos objetos possam fornecer uma chave para a compreensão da história da etnografia e da arqueologia. Este artigo analisa como as coleções conectaram regiões coloniais a áreas metropolitanas na segunda metade do século XIX, no caso particular do Brasil, Paris e Holanda. Discute ainda o papel da mulher na produção de coleções arqueológicas e etnográficas e, consequentemente, o seu lugar na produção de conhecimento antropológico e arqueológico.

Applying the Avant-Garde: Display Experience in the Exhibition of Modern Art (1948)

The Exhibition of Modern Art (Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej) organized in 1948 in the Palace of Art (Pałac Sztuki) in Cracow was one of the most prominent art events in Poland during the last century. It is considered one of the unprecedented moments in shaping the modernity. The exhibition was thought to be designed as a whole venture, integrating the modern art demonstration with the will to make it accessible to all the social groups. The desire of the authors was to endear the authorities, since the Stalinist repressions were approaching, and present the modern art as accessible to the society and needed in the “new socialist order”. Simultaneously, the primal context for the exhibition, underlined by its authors as well as the critics in subsequent years, were the surrealist exhibitions in Paris. This new avant-garde mode of displaying, so attractive for the Polish artists, put in the foreground not the traditional reception of art, implied by the traditional museology, but mostly focused on the spectator’s experience and used all possible kinds of tools to enhance it. These two approaches were usually presented as antagonistic and impossible to reconcile. The article attempts to analyze the tools which the display’s authors used to merge the avant-garde display with didacticism. While looking at the Recovered Territories Exhibition which took place a couple of months earlier, one might notice that the Exhibition of Modern Art was not the first display that accommodated the avant-garde solutions to the didactic and propagandistic venture.

Ethnographic Installation and “The Archive”: Haunted Relations and Relocations

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the haunted relationality of ethnographic archives and anthropology, and the potential for multimodal installations to highlight these tensions while bringing anthropology toward new audiences and new types of collaborations. We argue that experimental ethnographic installations can be used to foreground complex relations among fieldwork, archives, re/dislocation, and aspiration, through nonlinear forms of argumentation and engagement. The particular cases considered are as follows: (1) Vidali’s corpus of material collected in Zambia (1986–90) and (2) Phillips and Vidali’s remixed and relocated “radio program” based on these materials and installed as a multisensorial, multimodal ethnographic exhibition in Washington, DC, Paris, and London.

Norwid i Edmund Chojecki-podróżnik

The writer Edmund Chojecki (Charles Edmond) was one of Norwid’s most significant acquaintances, already in the Warsaw period, and later in Paris. Their friendship started in Warsaw in the 1840s and lasted a lifetime (or at least until the 1870s), although its preserved epistolary traces are scarce. This article focuses on Chojecki’s reports from his travels and their inspiring influence on Norwid: Edmund’s trip with Count Branicki to the Crimea (Wspomnienia z podróży po Krymie, Warszawa 1845), journey to the North Seas with Prince Napoleon (Voyage dans les mers du Nord, Paris 1857), Chojecki’s sojourn in Egypt at the turn of 1851, and finally his involvement in preparing the Egyptian exhibition (as the commissioner general) at the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris (L’Égypte à l’Exposition universelle de 1867, Paris 1867). The most important outcome of this is Norwid’s drama Kleopatra i Cezar and his collection of Egyptian drawings in the album Orbis (I).

El neo-rococó en la creación de la(s) Nación(es)

El Rococó vio un renacimiento en el siglo XIX y se convirtió, junto con otros estilos del Antiguo Régimen, en una referencia para las élites (antiguas y emergentes) en ambos lados del Atlántico. Este artículo pretende mostrar cómo interiores y muebles, a primera vista objetos sobre todo decorativos, adquirieron en el pasaje del siglo XIX al XX distintos sentidos semánticos en el marco del ser nacional, a la par de la formación de las narrativas históricas de los estados-nación. Partiendo de un conjunto de muebles realizados en Prusia se explica cómo estos artefactos se convirtieron en armas ideológicas en la batalla por la hegemonía de la cultura entre Francia y el Imperio alemán durante la Exposición Universal de París de 1900.