Paris and America

If good Americans, when they die, go to Paris, good French design, when it ages, retires to New York. That, at least, is the impression offered by Paris/New York , a small and illuminating show about urban affinities at the Museum of the City of New York.
A Pol Rab illustration featuring Josephine BakerCurator Donald Albrecht has crammed a remarkable amount of evidence into a single gallery to describe the imbalance of influence in the 1920s and 1930s. New York’s battalion of francophile architects, designers and trendsetters avidly worked over each French fillip to adapt it for consumption in the US. Parisians were pickier about their Americana.
The show begins with the event that generated the phrase art deco: the 1925 “Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes” in Paris. Americans rushed through the flamboyantly ornamental gates and treated the fair as a catalogue of good taste.
In France, gilded geometries, textured surfaces and machine-age opulence existed to gratify a sense of exclusivity and privilege. The ultimate design achievement was a sublime – and sublimely costly – interior, such as the multi-patterned boudoir by Léon Jallot, featuring a jaunty little dressing table coated in genuine shark skin. Lord & Taylor soon adapted the table’s design – a pair of wedge-shaped sides with asymmetrical drawers supporting a slender slab – for the American market by manufacturing it in lacquered wood and omitting the fish hide.
What the French created in pursuit of charmed privacy, Americans applied to civic life. Art deco became the idiom of New York architecture, exemplified in the gothic shine of the Chrysler Building and the lavishly decorated mountains of the Rockefeller Center. These were public gestures, proud proclamations of capitalism. Even the public works programme of the New Deal adopted art deco as its default, so that flutings and curves born in Parisian boutiques came to adorn American bridges.
Paris created luxury; New York democratised it. In 1935, a giant container full of French design sailed into New York harbour: the SS Normandie, which entertained passengers at a level of up-to-the-minute luxe that ignited the imagination of magazine editors, art directors, advertisers and consumers. It was the ship that launched a thousand products.
The museum has several relics and a few photographs on display, just enough to hint at the steamer’s mystique. A few feet away is a small section devoted to the designs of Donald Deskey and Raymond Loewy, who transformed the voluptuous art deco of first-class travel into a streamlined version fit for toasters, space heaters, gas cookers and electric shavers.
Today, when trends decreed by 12-year-olds zip round the globe, it is difficult to imagine the force with which design ideas used to flow outwards from one creative centre. The French ironwork virtuoso Edgar Brandt designed decorative grilles for the 1925 exhibition that were imitated in gates and elevators all over the US. Brandt also wrought a fire screen depicting a doe in the woods, which inspired a textile print adorning showrooms at Bonwit Teller and who knows how many homes.
Americans had always had Paris. The city’s state-sponsored academy, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, had trained the cream of American designers and lent its truncated name to an earlier architectural style: beaux arts. Many of New York’s civic landmarks – notably Grand Central Station – flaunt the same arches, columns, garlands and Italianate masonry that adorn the old Gare (now Musée) d’Orsay. Paris supplied the rules and the rebellion. New York had only to follow in its dog-like fashion, first in one direction then another, perpetually wagging its tail.
Oddly, the most important ambassador of French design culture to the US gets only a cursory mention here, perhaps because his influence extended so far beyond the show’s chronological frame. Le Corbusier’s contribution to the 1925 exposition, the monkish, sternly décor-proof “Pavilion de l’esprit nouveau”, was a reproach to the sumptuous surfaces of the time. It also foretold a chapter of modernism that would outlast art deco by decades.
Le Corbusier arrived in New York on the Normandie in 1935 and did not like what he saw. He had already proposed doing to Baron Haussman’s Paris what Haussman had done to the medieval city: ripping it up, airing it out and making it more geometric. He envisioned great high-rise blocks, isolated by orderly plains. Manhattan’s skyscrapers, he proclaimed, were too puny and too clustered; they did not, in other words, sufficiently resemble his drawings for the ideal city. America later did as he instructed: Le Corbusier’s “tower in a park” became the basic module for innumerable soulless housing projects.
To the French, on the other hand, New York-style density had little appeal. Magazines gleefully published montages of skyscrapers dwarfing Notre Dame, but they had the frisson of the unbelievable. The first high-rise in central Paris, the appalling Tour Montparnasse, was not built until the early 1970s, and the experience was so traumatic none has gone up since.
Le Corbusier did not hate everything American. Louis Armstrong, he said, was “the black titan . . . Shakespearian . . . alternately demonic, playful and monumental . . . This man is madly intelligent; he is a king.” By the time he heard Satchmo in Boston, the French had been besotted with jazz for more than a dozen years, thanks to the efforts of composers and artists such as Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Jean Cocteau, George Antheil and George Gershwin.
But, as the exhibit documents, Paris anointed Josephine Baker as America’s special envoy, at least in part because her image had such great graphic potential. (See the Pol Rab illustration above, which features her.) One of the show’s highlights is a lacquer panel, resembling a Byzantine icon, of Baker swathed in little more than a pattern of fine art deco lines. To symbol-hungry Parisians, she was a profane goddess imprinted with the marks of the modern city – flesh made architecture.
The trade that brought Josephine Baker in one direction and Le Corbusier in the other captures the uneven relationship between the two cities at that time. America went shopping for ideas in Paris and bought the whole programme. Parisians took their American culture one token at a time.