100 J.-A. PEMBERTON
them to paint frescoes and to decorate the French pavilions, a good
number of which, it is worth noting, were consecrated to such artefacts
of modernity as cinema, advertising, aluminium, radio and television.^54
Architects too were employed extensively on behalf of the exposition.
Due to the influence exercised on the ministry of education by the Union
des artistes moderne (UAM), the formation of which was announced
in 1929 in a manifesto which declared that the UAM was dedicated to
‘L’Art moderne cadre de la vie contemporaine,’ it was modernist architec-
ture that held sway throughout the city.^55 Yet in keeping with the desire
of the organisers to generate among the French citizens a sense of their
essential unity, it was a somewhat restrained form of modernism that
characterised the architecture of the exposition in its totality.^56 The formal
instruction given to the architects was that of ‘harmony of the most rev-
olutionary modernism with the most profound respect for the formidable
patrimony of traditions.’^57
Generating considerable excitement was the Palais de l’air, its focal
point being a massive Aeronautical Hall. Hanging from its ceilings was
a display designed by Robert and Sonia Delaunay consisting of ‘gigantic,
aluminium rings reminiscent of the rings of Saturn or the paths of elec-
trons,’ encircling a fighter plane. Yet it was not only the airplane’s mil-
itary function that was highlighted within the walls of the Aeronautical
Hall: bas-reliefs depicted ‘airlines tying together (with France leading the
way), Europe, the Americas, Indochina and Africa’.^58
Such a depiction was evocative of the more general idea of a border-
less modernity, its instruments serving to shrink the distances amongst
peoples, thereby, as the bas-reliefs in the Aeronautical Hall suggested,
socially uniting them. This idea was also evoked in the Pavillon de la
(^54) Ibid.
(^55) Jonathan M. Woodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la Vie Moderne,’
in Jonathan M. Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780192800978.001.0001, and Bertrand
Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie mod-
erne,’ in Isabelle Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architectures,
1855 – 1937 (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine/Centre des monuments nationaux, 2009), 71.
(^56) Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 105, and Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition interna-
tionale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ 71.
(^57) Robert Lange, 1937, quoted in Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 105.
(^58) Chandler, ‘Railway and Airline,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des
arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).