April in Paris: Theatricality, Modernism, and Politics at the 1925 Art Deco Expo by Irene R. Makaryk (review)

Spoiler alert: Irene Makaryk's April in Paris: Theatricality, Modernism and Politics at the 1925 Art Deco Expo comes to an exciting finish with her account of the adoption of constructivist theatricality in the United States. Makaryk extends the reach of the Paris Expo by drawing attention to the excitement generated by its theatre exhibits when they appeared in the International Theatre Exposition of 1926 in New York. The impact of artists from the recently established Soviet Union transformed design for performance into a socially and culturally dynamic event space. Makaryk gives a graphic account and gathers up the threads of her thoroughly researched and documented narrative of the international cultural significance of the spectator-designer-performer nexus in this period.

Running from April to October 1925, the Exposition internationale de arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris followed on the heels of the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution; it was the largest exhibition of design to date. The mandate of the French organizers of the exhibition was to identify a modern style commensurate with industrial, technological, and scientific advances. The organizers remapped part of central Paris as a liminal zone with national pavilions along both banks of the Seine, extending in either direction from the Alexandre III Bridge and the Grand Palais, which was built for the exhibition of 1900 and renovated to accommodate the critical explorations. Fifteen million people attended the exhibition, and amongst its enthusiastic visitors was the editor of The Little Review who was stimulated to invite eighteen of the countries to exhibit their theatre section in New York as part of the International Theatre Exposition of 1926.

Irene Makaryk argues persuasively that the focus on design is of particular interest in terms of space – as a production of space. Drawing on the work of sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Makaryk conceptualizes her study in terms of the design of the public urban space, the architectonics of performance locations, and the cultural curation of theatre design. Lefebvre's attention to the representation of space, the represented space, and the experience of space – his triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space – stimulates her analysis of the exhibitions. Her extensive research pays close attention to the curatorial decisions to inquire into staging a new style. She points to the ceremonial design of the multiple portals to the exhibition and the extensive lighting displays sited on, under, and around the Alexandre III Bridge and draws attention to the innovations evident in the Soviet pavilion that attested to reconfiguring public space and abstracting theatrical space on stages in displays of maquettes, sketches, and production images. Once transferred to New York, statements by selected designers were published in a special issue of The Little Review, and Frederick Kiesler's architecturally inflected imperative for invented space entered into the design vocabularies, exceeding in boldness the proposals made by the stage designed for the Grand Palais in Paris. What was identified as distinct in Paris became the impetus for exploration by American designers, such as evidence of the successful blending of film with live action by Les Kurbas in the Soviet pavilion, which encouraged subsequent multimedia explorations in the United States.

Spectatorship and reviewing is a crucial component of the study. Extensive eyewitness accounts document these early polarized encounters with constructivist design both in Paris and New York, but, in the latter case, the support of the exhibition by the designer jurors also made for a strong impetus to explore them practically. Makaryk notes the idiosyncracy of the exposition in 1925 in the absence of reference in the displays to the work of Jacques Copeau and Jean Cocteau in Paris. The volume makes possible a comparison of the reaction to the theatricality of the radical Soviet theatre in the European and North American reviews of the two exhibitions. The notes to each of the seven chapters are extensive and support a...