2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 99intended as a riposte to the ‘cool rationality’ of the exhibitions at the
Palais de Tokyo and the Petit Palais, a riposte which saw the art works
displayed ‘in near-total darkness’ (that is, until the organisers ran out of
torches), ‘amid strategically located clutter.’^48 Although fairly success-
ful with the public, the exhibition’s critics ‘deplored what they saw as
the negation of the French spirit...in what amounted to no more than
a jumble of odds and ends.’^49 Rather more perceptive, Durozol states,
was the observation of the critic Raymond Cogniat: that ‘each visitor
is forced to accept the unacceptable and can only escape his discomfort
through laughter or anger.’^50 Indeed, what some dismissed as an insane
or frightfully melancholic show of art would in the wake of the Munich
Agreement of September 30, 1938, seem like a ‘strange premonition’.^51
It would not be too long before most of the contributing artists, ‘more
politicised than their average contemporaries and...aware that everything
overnight can turn into violence,’ would be forced into hiding in France
or into exile abroad, that is, if they had not already been sent to intern-
ment camps as foreign ‘undesirables’ in light of the French government’s
decree of November 12, 1938.^52
Through the organisation of the artistic dimension of the 1937 expo-
sition, the French government also sought to alleviate poverty among
artists: the market for art had declined, not only due to depressed eco-
nomic conditions but also to the artistic embrace of abstract art, a style
of art that had not proved wildly popular among the buying public.^53
In addition to a humanitarian concern, there was a feeling of embarrass-
ment at the time about the abject state of artists given Paris’s standing as
a world centre of artistic creativity. Thus, the French government along
with the city of Paris employed two thousand artists, commissioning
(^48) Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39. For
the use of torches at the International Surrealist Exhibition, see Durozol, ‘Painting and
Sculpture,’ 256.
(^49) Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 258.
(^50) Raymond Cogniat, 1938, quoted ibid.
(^51) Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’art en guerre: 2 octobre 2012–17 février
2013 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012). Exhibition brochure.
(^52) Ibid. See also ‘Liste des décrets-lois,’ Le Temps, November 14, 1938, and Vicki Caron,
‘Prelude to Vicy: France and the Jewish Refugees in the Era of Appeasement,’ Journal of
Contemporary History 2, no. 1 (1985): 157–76, 164–65.
(^53) Chandler, ‘Duality,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des tech-
niques dans la vie moderne (1937).