Statue – Mannequin Border – World’s Fairs

Antonis’ use of statues as photographic models and Robert Couturier’s custom-made, statue-like mannequins (as photographed by Wols) present two examples of the blurring of domains.

These themes are combined with the World’s Fairs and Great Exhibitions in this section because they share common ground: both process the present through the lens of the past, particularly antiquity. As an example of this, material from the 1935 Miss Universe competition, which Brussels hosted, is shown. It uses the Venus de Milo for its poster.

Art, design, architecture, and consumer culture are powerful political tools. The underlying agenda of the International Exhibition of 1925 was to promote France as the world’s arbiter of good taste and the leading producer of beautiful things. As France’s fashion and beauty industry produced almost as much Gross National Product as heavy industry in 1925, this was for sound economic reasons. Notions of luxury, and by extension beauty and seduction, were therefore deliberately interwoven with national identity, as they still are today. The 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris was partly a campaign by Western colonial powers (including the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands) to justify their activities at a time when the rationale behind imperialist expansion was increasingly being questioned. Here, colonialism was presented simplistically as beneficial to all, implying a natural order between colonized and colonizer. Art, design, and the applied arts were complicit in enforcing racial division; they sampled non-Western motifs as surface pattern without interest in the indigenous cultures that produced them. The World’s Fair Exposition of 1937 was a stage for the diplomatic tensions that would soon lead to World War Two. It is remembered for the striking image of Albert Speer’s German pavilion in an ideological face-off with Boris Iofan and Vera Mukhina’s USSR pavilion, framing the Eiffel tower. But it was not only the Soviet Union and Germany who were waging a propaganda war. It could also be found in the British pavilion, with its scenes of cricket and fox hunting, and in the various presentations of the French.

Women were frequently used as motifs at World’s Fairs: as national allegory in figurative statues and “decorating” the sites as consumers. This concealed how little women actively participated or had their everyday realities addressed.