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LDR Category List
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Paris 1900: Une Capitale des Arts
VHS color video.
14 minutes
Available from Films for the Humanities and Sciences at 800-257-5126 or www.films.com.
1900: Art at the Crossroads
by Robert Rosenblum, et al.
Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2000.
445 pp., cloth.
ISBN 0-8109-4303-4.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
These are two very distinct but related items, one a brief collection of scenes of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris (filmed on location by the Lumiere Brothers); the other a plush and informative book on the same subject, in which is described and depicted (in 500 illustrations, with 300 in full-color) "the collision of styles and generations" that came together in what was then the largest international exhibition of contemporary art ever assembled. A major attraction was the Grand Palais, which offered a mammoth centennial view of French art since 1800, from the allegories of Neoclassicism to Auguste Rodin's Gates of Hell to the work of the once-controversial Impressionists. Arranged to move out from the base of the Eiffel Tower (a legacy of the previous World's Fair), the 1900 Exposition Universelle premiered a palace lighted by 10,000 electric lights, the first moving sidewalk (like the ramps we use in airports now), and, along the banks of the Seine, reenactments of living conditions in other times and exotic places. The book, which coincided with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (London) and the Guggenheim Museum (New York) that ended in September 2000, is a stunning review of the artists (nearly all painters and sculptors) whose work was significant at the turn of the century, either because they were already established and soon to decline or because they were just then emerging as experimental Modernists. Among the most valuable parts of the book is a 70-page section titled "Biographies," which features rare photographs of and brief biographies about more than 190 artists.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)
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