De Paris à Boulogne-Billancourt

Boulogne-Billancourt, the suburb to the west of Paris, was a major centre for French art during the interwar period and today has many items from the 1925 Art Deco exhibition in its municipal museums and its public spaces. The historic context goes some way towards explaining this situation, which is also due to a reasoned policy of acquisitions, aiming at building up a heritage collection around “classic” figurative art during the twentieth century, echoing the avant-gardes of the time. The Musée des Années Trente, the 1930s museum, holds many pieces by Joseph Bernard, Max Blondat, Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Carlo Sarrabezolles, Georges Saupique or Valentine Reyre. These all bear witness to the importance of the parts played by sculpture, furniture and sacred art in the 1925 exhibition. Works exhibited on this occasion, in the form of preparatory sketches or manufactured objects, serve as documentation for analysing the genesis of a key moment in the history of twentieth-century art, and for understanding this moment’s subsequent critical fortune. The sketches and monumental sculptures associated with the project for a Temple de l’Homme, a temple for mankind, also presented in 1925, constitute a remarkable ensemble in the collections of the Paul Landowski Museum, vestiges of one of this sculptor’s most ambitious undertakings. The richness of these pieces all conserved in Boulogne-Billancourt make for one of the most emblematic and coherent collections in the public domain associated with the 1925 exhibition, bearing witness to its aesthetic ambitions and to its subsequent appropriation by the museum world.