2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 97points out that Masterpieces of French Art comprised 1341 works in
total. He adds that this number was unprecedented for such a subject.^38
Among the masterpieces of French art on display were works of antiq-
uity, that is, from Gallo-Roman times, from the height of the middle
ages, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and from the age of
the impressionists.^39 Although acknowledging that this retrospective of
French art was not part of the international exposition, an official guide to
the exposition issued by the Société pour le Développement du Tourisme
nonetheless urged people to attend it in order that they could ‘study the
first expressions of our creative genius’ and more generally see brought
together for the first time so many ‘sister-works.’^40 In relation to this last
observation, the comment of Louis Gillet concerning the retrospective
(which seems to have been both a popular and critical success), is worth
noting: it was ‘a demonstration of French culture’s “essential unity”’.^41
However, as Jerry Cullum points out, such unity came at the price
of ‘excluding four decades of 20th-century aesthetic disputation,’ and
it was with this exclusion in view that the curators of the Museum of
Modern Art of the Municipality of Paris organised a major retrospec-
tive in the Petit Palais called Masters of Independent Art (Les maîtres
was ‘purged of Picasso, foreign artists, surrealists and abstractionists... [and]...dedicated
primarily to an art of consensus which is strictly French.’ Musée d’art moderne de la Ville
de Paris, L’art en guerre: 12 octobre-17 février 2013 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville
de Paris, 2012). Exhibition brochure. Philippe Dagen notes that staging the presentation at
the museum, rendered ‘more difficult the requisition of the building by the Nazis.’ He also
points out that ‘in October 1942, the lower floors of the building would become one of the
places to stock goods pillaged from Jewish Parisians. At the Palais de Tokyo, some dozens of
pianos accumulate from November 15 and remain there as far as April 1945 and their resti-
tution to the surviving owners—when there are some survivors.’ Dagen, ‘La malédition du
Palais de Tokyo,’ 49.
(^38) Pascal Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937:
Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 31.
(^39) Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et tech-
niques, Paris 1937, 92, and Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition by James
D. Herbert, 39.
(^40) Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition by James D. Herbert, 39, and
Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 283–84.
(^41) Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39. On the
exhibition’s success see Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris
1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie
moderne, 32.