1900

Like Gallé’s own goals in his work, the 1900 Exposition Universelle brought art and industry together more closely than perhaps any previous exposition, with its emphasis on Art Nouveau architectural design throughout. Roger Marx was pivotal to the presence of Art Nouveau at the 1900 Exposition, and with his help, the 1900 Exposition Universelle presented the largest array of Art Nouveau artists to ever show in one place, including works by Gallé alongside contemporaries like Hector Guimard, Jacques Marjorelle, Georges Charpentier, Siegfried Bing, and René Lalique among others. As a distinctly modern style, based in nature and not on any pre-existing model, Art Nouveau was yet another exemplar of modernism at the exposition. The influence of Art Nouveau could be seen beyond the artist’s displays.[5] Art Nouveau’s stylization of nature is evident on the façade of Pavillon Bleu (Figure 20), a restaurant built for the 1900 Exposition. The abstracted floral motifs and the tangling vine-like parapet recall the same forms that Gallé was creating in his furniture. Similarly, Hector Guimard’s station entrances for the Métropolitain show Art Nouveau’s iconic whiplash curves (Figure 19). Art Nouveau’s prevalence at the 1900 Exposition further underscored a proliferation of modernity.

The 1900 Exposition Universelle exemplified the Third Republic’s policy of colonial expansion and represented France’s civilizing mission and the integration of these colonies into greater France as a part of the modern age. The French government collaborated with other entities to create reproductions of sites of French colonial activity and sell to its audiences the importance of continued imperial expansion. For most visitors, this was their only chance to confront these “exotic” cultures, and so the impressions they made were lasting ones. The Catalogue Général Officiel of the exposition remarked on these displays and their visitors, “If they cannot go to the Orient, the Orient has come to them.”[6] Visitors to the exposition could even buy souvenirs in honor of their visits to these colonialist displays. For example, Jules Charles-Roux’s drawing of the Indochinese display (1900, Figure 21) shows the display nestled in an imagined tropical landscape, populated with renderings of indigenous people. The drawing is accompanied by a caption crediting the French architect of the display, M.A. Marcel. The image is number sixty-six in his souvenir book, one among many in a series pseudo-ethnographic collectibles. In addition to shaping French perceptions of the colonies and protectorates, the exposition helped to form a sense of French national identity that defined itself around its contrast to the exoticized “other” it illustrated in these colonialist displays.

As Herman Lebovics explained, modernism and colonialism are “reciprocally potentializing,” or mutually contributing to and reinforcing each other’s development.[7] Thus, as a microcosm of the modern world, one must acknowledge the presence of colonialism at the 1900 Exposition alongside all the displays of modernity. Despite France’s policy of integration, sites of French colonialism were not treated equally, and their displays were more in keeping with a justification for France’s civilizing mission as a means of integration rather than as individual cultures with their own achievements. French colonies and protectorates, including Algeria, Cambodia, and French West Africa, whose displays included decorative arts and were admired by visitors all the same, were relegated to the furthest possible distance, diagonally across the Seine near the Palais du Trocadero.[8]

As sites of French colonialism, their utility was advertised in the form of the raw materials they could provide. Catalogues that accompanied the exposition had lists of organizations, organized by colony, with references to materials that were exported to France (Figure 22).[9] In the 1900 Catalogue Général Officiel, exposition officials wrote that advances in maritime navigation and improvements to inland waterways helped to improve ease of access to imported materials that had to travel great distances. As a result, importations of exotic woods from sites of French colonization, like Cameroon and Madagascar increased.[10] The colonial wood trade is one of the undeniable spoils of France’s colonial efforts and made the value of French colonies to France clear, providing continued economic justification for French colonialism. Despite being admired for their aesthetic value, these territories were geographically othered, and placed opposite French mechanical and industrial displays, implying that these colonies and protectorates were another on the list of French achievements. Colonial displays advertised bois des îles as one of the advantages of French colonialism. Furniture, like the works produced by Émile Gallé, showed their stunning application to the arts.

Changes in access to materials and technology created pressure for ébenistes, or cabinetmakers, to differentiate their work from furniture that was mass-produced to meet growing demands. In the 1900 Catalogue Général Officiel, exposition officials noted an increase in demand for and consumption of wood in France. They explained this was the result of the introduction of electrical machine tools that allowed for furniture to be made more quickly and less expensively. This mechanization of furniture quickly led to the mass production bon marché furniture that was more easily accessible to a growing middle class. This occurrence was coined “the era of inexpensive furniture.”[11] However, this also created a bifurcation in the market where ébenistes needed to define themselves in opposition to the industrial furniture makers. While early French woodworkers most commonly used luxury wood grown in France as it was more easily obtainable, these advances in colonial trade allowed woodworkers to become more familiar with exotic colonial woods and they used them more often.[12] As the 1900 Exposition Universelle Catalogue notes, fin-de-siècle woodworkers used bois des îles as a way to differentiate themselves and their products from bon marché furniture,  through “real discoveries of taste.”[13] Luxury furniture, and thus its maker, in 1900 came to be defined by its carved ornamentation that could only be created by hand, with a gouge, and not by electrical machine tools, and by using imported and unusual materials that were more difficult to access and more expensive than the local wood that had previously been used.[14]

By the 1900 Exposition Universelle, Gallé was aligning himself with the qualities associated with fine art, and presenting them to a vast public: using rare, exotic materials, using techniques that required skilled work by hand rather than with machine, and aligning himself with the civilizing mission of France, taking raw materials imported from sites of colonialism and shaping them into refined artistic works.