Dates

Wed., January 25, 2023 – Sun., July 2, 2023

Venue

Exhibition room 5

During the 1920s, France underwent modernization at an unprecedented scale and speed as part of post-World War I revitalization efforts. This led to what became known as the Années Folles (the Roaring Twenties), an era in which culture matured through mass production and consumption. The period also saw a change in values. Fernand Léger made paintings that glorified a rational, dynamic mechanical civilization, and geometric forms became all the rage in architecture and commercial design.

Despite being a flourishing era, the period also gave rise to critical views of modernization. In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton lashed out at dehumanizing rationalism, and conceived of surrealism as a means of using the subconscious to explore “super-reality.” This idea resonated with the Spanish-born French émigré painter Salvador Dalí, whose created mysterious paintings with “double images” in which, for example, a horse took on the appearance of a lion or human figure. Many other artists also used their own techniques to explore and expand the scope of visual art.

Moreover, as the city was being created anew in the ’20s, interest grew in painters who were depicting disappearing landscapes and people. Of special note in this regard was a group of artists who had moved to Paris from other countries in 1910s, and started to receive acclaim around this time for their paintings of impoverished living conditions, old street corners, and sorrowful figures. In 1925, the art critic André Warnod dubbed them the École de Paris (School of Paris).

The nostalgic gaze of these artists, who lived between two eras, can also be seen as a form of resistance to rapid modernization.