L’affaire de la Cour des métiers 

Every international exhibition or world fair has what the French call its ‘clou’, its ‘nail’ or highlight, a main attraction designed to ensure the success of the whole affair. At the 1925 international exhibition of modern decorative and industrial arts, this highlight was supposed to be the Cour des métiers, the crafts courtyard, a sort of contemplative cloister with simple geometric lines designed by the exhibition’s main architect, Charles Plumet. This ensemble has disappeared today, but certain parts of it survive and numerous documents and pictures keep traces of it, allowing us to take a look at the historic, aesthetic, geographical and heritage issues involved. Designed as the central point of the exhibition, this courtyard expressed the thinking and tastes of the organisers, in particular Paul Leon, the assistant curator, and Louis Bonnier, director of the architectural services. The courtyard had an ample decoration of statues, bas-reliefs and nine marouflaged canvasses attached to the walls. These celebrated themes from daily life with decorative paintings executed by d’Octave Guillonnet, Henri Marret and Henri Rapin, all giving an overall tone to the event and fixing an image for the style of the period.These canvasses, however, were not the decoration initially intended. To begin with, after an examination of their proposed designs, seven painters had been chosen to decorate the courtyard with frescoes. This interrupted project became something of an ‘affair’, on account of the personality of the art critic Gabriel Mourey. This affair gives us indications about the organisation of the exhibition, the circumstances of the commission, its relations to modernity and the heritage future of the works, designed only for temporary showing. Using archival sources, articles in the press and photographs all analysed during my thesis research, this article sets out to retrace the genesis, the reception and the posterity of the paintings, in France and in the United States. It looks at the place of mural decorations within the Art Deco heritage, between memories and the future.