104 J.-A. PEMBERTON
opposite, the two figures comprising Mukhina’s sculptural work, which
was entitled Worker and Collective Farm Woman, together held aloft a
hammer and sickle.^69 Meanwhile, at the base of the German pavilion, a
‘massively naked Teutonic couple...[stared]... at the Russian monument
with grim determination’.^70 Although the pavilions at such international
exhibitions had often been used as vehicles for the expression of national
aspirations or the assertion of national prestige in the past, at the 1937
exposition this tendency reached dizzying heights, its apotheosis being
the face en face between the pavilion of Nazi Germany and that of the
USSR.^71
This architectural encounter was immediately notorious. In his auto-
biography, the composer Darius Milhaud pointed out that the French
government had decided to hold a ceremony at the Sorbonne in June
1937 in order to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of
Briand. With this ceremony in view, it commissioned Milhaud to write a
musical piece, the issue of this commission being a choral work entitled,
appropriately enough for a composition intended as an homage to one
of the two principal sponsors of the Pact of Paris, Cantate de la paix.
Milhaud’s music provided the setting for words penned by Paul Claudel,
a poet and diplomat who had served as ambassador at Washington D.C.
from 1928 to 1933 and who had worked closely with Briand over a long
period. Another commission that Milhaud received concerned the Musée
de l’Homme. In his autobiography, the composer noted that Vicomte
(^69) Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la
vie moderne,’ 71. These sculptures were over twenty-four metres in high. According to
Chandler, Albert Speer claimed to have ‘accidentally stumbled into a room containing a
sketch of the Russian Pavilion’ and thus was able to design a building which dominated the
Soviet Pavilion opposite. Chandler, ‘The Dialectics of National Pavilions,’ in Confrontation:
The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). On
the association between Vera Mukhina and Antoine Bourdelle, see Durozol, ‘Painting
and Sculpture,’ 284. The title of Mukhina’s sculpture is recorded in Herbert, Paris 1937:
Worlds on Exhibition, 14.
(^70) Chandler, ‘The Dialectics of National Pavilions,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition
internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).
(^71) Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ 12. The Italian pavilion glorified
Fascism in monumental style and in the form of an ‘equestrian statue “The genius of fas-
cism”’ which was erected in front of it. See Simeone, ‘Music at the 1937 Paris Exposition,’
- Jonathan M. Woodham states that the modernist British pavilion avoided the tendency
to propagandise in its displays. Woodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la
Vie Moderne,’ in Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design.